These are brief comments on an excellent paper by Jeffrey Liebman and Richard Zeckhauser, prepared for a conference sponsored by the Urban Institute and Brookings on tax and health care policy. Liebman and Zeckhauser summarize the complexities involved in making optimal health insurance...

The task is to give an overview of what I hope to be an emerging field of behavioral public finance. Behavioral finance, as per Barberis and Thaler 2003 (and others), consists of two parts: (1) individual level heuristics and biases, which can lead to sub-optimal (inconsistent) judgment and...

Tax and other fiscal policy systems inevitably affect patterns of work, marriage, household formation, child-bearing, and more. These 'micro-level' concerns are important subjects for 'fiscal sociology' to consider from a multidisciplinary perspective. This essay looks at some gendered aspects...

Three studies of attitudes toward tax policies were conducted on the World Wide Web. The results show several effects. In penalty aversion, subjects preferred bonuses over penalties, when policies differ only in how they are formally described. In the Schelling effect, subjects prefer both...

Anglo-American law has long allowed an owner to do pretty much whatever she wants with her property, right down to the limiting case of using it all up or wasting it. The jus abutendi, or the "right of destroying or injuring [one's property] if one likes," has long been recognized as one of the...

This was the question posed at the Herman Goldman Memorial Lecture, held at the Bar Association of the City of New York on the evening of May 22, 2000. Its topicality, given the Ways and Means Committee's decision to repeal the federal estate and gift tax, is obvious. Taking the affirmative, and...

This paper examines the relationship between attitudes on potential uses of the budget surplus and gender. Survey results show relatively weak support overall for using a projected surplus to reduce taxes, with respondents much likelier to prefer increased social spending on education or social...

Three experiments carried out on the World Wide Web assessed the consistency of attitudes toward various tax regimes that differed in their overall levels and degrees of tax rate graduation in the presence of framing manipulations. The regimes had two components: an income and a payroll tax. One...

This brief commentary on David Weisbach's essay (available on ssrn at http://ssrn.com/abstract=911604) first identifies Weisbach's contribution as stating an Equivalence Theorem: putting aside matters affecting the taxation of the pure riskless rate of return, any method of implementing an...

The most common use of the insights of behavioral economics in the cause of fundamental tax reform has been to argue for the employment of ad hoc tax-favored savings vehicles - such as individual retirement accounts (IRAs), medical, and educational savings accounts, and so on - within an...