Contrary to the conventional view on consumption taxes, state and local sales taxes extend to the acquisition of capital assets and are especially burdensome on equipment. These taxes partially offset allocational distortions caused by tax provisions present prior to the Tax Reform Act of 1986...

The estate tax has received a great deal of attention from policy makers and the public in recent years. Yet we know little about its effect on the transfer of wealth. In this paper we explore the effect of the tax on inter vivos giving. In particular, we look at the degree to which wealthy...

In this article, we empirically gauge the government revenue-expenditure nexus for a state. Employing Granger-causality and vector autoregression techniques, our stylized results indicate that state revenues cause state expenditures. Furthermore, we find that federal grants are not a significant...

Much of the literature on the effects of estate taxation on charitable bequests has relied on cross sectional data, reflecting the uniqueness of death. Few have explored longitudinal data to exploit exogenous variations in tax regimes. The latter, however, continue to be susceptible to omitted...