Much of the debate surrounding the enactment of President Reagan's tax plan was concerned with the short run effects of macroeconomic stimulation. Now that the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 has become law, it is appropriate to look again at the long run effect of these tax cuts. This paper...

This paper presents estimates of static and dynamic general equilibrium resource allocation effects for four alternative plans for corporate and personal income tax integration in the U.S. A medium-scale numerical general equilibrium model is used which integrates the U.S. tax system with...

Despite much recent interest in a consumption tax, the Treasury Department's November 1984 tax plan proposes to adopt carefully coordinated features of a more comprehensive income tax, including the indexation of interest, depreciation, and capital gains.The May 1985 White House proposal would...

The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980 follows the "polluter pays" principle by placing retroactive liability on responsible firms. Yet this cost is borne by current shareholders who did not benefit from past low-cost waste management. This...

This paper provides a broad overview of recent trends in solid waste and recycling, related public policy issues, and the economics literature devoted to these topics. Public attention to solid waste and recycling has increased dramatically over the past decade both in the United States and in...

Despite technological advances, an individual car's emissions still cannot be measured reliably enough to impose a Pigovian tax. This paper explores alternative market incentives that could be used instead. We solve for second-best combinations of uniform taxes on gasoline, engine size, and...

Tax rules have changed almost yearly in the United States since 1980. In particular, the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 reduced marginal tax rates and shortened depreciation lifetimes, while the Tax Reform Act of 1986 reduced marginal tax rates, repealed the investment tax credit, and...

In this paper, we use tax policy choices to illustrate and investigate the more general problem of using uncertain parameter values in models to evaluate policy choices. We show, for this tax example, how debate on an elasticity parameter translates into a debate about policy choices, andvice...

Additional solid waste disposal imposes resource and environmental costs, but most residents still pay no additional fee per marginal unit of garbage collection. In a simple model with garbage and recycling as the only two disposal options, we show that the optimizing fee for garbage collection...

When government needs more revenue than is available from a pollution tax rate equal to marginal environmental damage, our intuition tells us to raise the tax on the clean good above zero and to raise the tax on the dirty good above that first-best Pigouvian rate. Yet new results suggest that...