The goal of this paper is to study the effects of introducing income redistribution at the municipal level, with the adoption of local tax progressivity. In particular, we analyse whether this complex fiscal tool modifies the incentives of local politicians to be strategic leading to higher tax...

The Constitution (One-Hundred and Twenty-Second Amendment) Bill, 2014 currently pending consideration of the Parliament seeks to usher a new indirect tax regime in India purported as the ‘Goods and Service Tax' The avowed intent of this Amendment Bill, in terms of its “Statement of Objects...

There are many federal, state, and local laws that distort housing decisions and prices. However, it is often difficult to tease out the quantitative impact of such policies. In this paper, we examine the implications of one of the most significant tax changes initiated by voters in the United...

The principal purpose of this paper is to derive an expected value measure of the tax underreporting rate given only tax authority enforcement data. The main result is that the expected value measure of the underreporting rate is a modified geometric mean function of the audit rate and the...

The municipal bond market is a $2.8 trillion market of which approximately 70 percent is held by private investors (SEC 2010). Municipal bondholders and potential buyers do not have the same level of information as those investors choosing to invest in public companies. In part this inequity is...

In recent years, Canada's courts have expressed a number of conflicting views about whether the parol evidence rule can be invoked by or against the Minister of National Revenue (Minister) in tax disputes. Unfortunately, the courts in these cases did not elaborate, to a sufficient extent, on the...

We use regional variation in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009-2012) to analyze the effect of government spending on consumer spending. Our consumption data come from household-level retail purchases in Nielsen and auto purchases from Equifax credit balances. We estimate that a $1...

In recent years debt in Colorado has increased at an unsustainable rate. A debt brake is simulated for the Colorado economy. When the debt brake is triggered the spending cap imposed by the Tabor Amendment is reduced, with surplus revenue earmarked for debt reduction. The simulation analysis...

Female-to-male employment in Senegal increased by 14 percentage points between 2006 and 2011. During the same period years of education of the working age population increased 27 percent for females and 13 percent for males, reducing gender gaps in education. In this paper, we quantitatively...