The rapid rise in sales over the Internet has generated debate over the taxation of such transactions since the buyers usually pay no sales tax. This paper uses new data on the purchase decisions of approximately 25,000 online users to examine the effects that local sales taxes have on Internet...

This paper shows that tax policy toward investment, by changing the relative prices of capital varieties, can have a direct effect on the quality of capital goods that firms purchase. The empirical results indicate that this impact is economically important and readily apparent in disaggregated...

Conventional wisdom holds that the social rate of return to R&D significantly exceeds the private rate of return and, therefore, R&D should be subsidized. In the U.S., the government has directly funded a large fraction of total R&D spending. This paper shows that there is a serious problem with...

This paper looks at the impact of investment tax subsidies on the labor market for capital goods workers using data from the 1979-88 Current Population Survey. The results show that investment subsidies drive up the wages of workers who produce capital goods relative to other manufacturing...

An influential literature on the effects of marginal tax rates on the behavior of the rich has claimed that the elasticity of taxable income with respect to the net of tax share is very high possibly exceeding one. These high estimated elasticities imply that cutting taxes on the rich does not...

The neoclassical investment literature assumes that capital is homogenous, lives forever and has a constant depreciation rate. More recent theories of investment have shown that when there are distinct capital vintages with embodied technologies, depreciation and capital retirement become...