Over the last 25 years, voters in 20 California counties approved “local transportation sales taxes†to pay for transportation projects. A growing source of revenue, they generate roughly $2.5 billion per year. Four features explain their popularity: they require direct voter approval;...

The rapid growth in online commerce has harmed state sales tax bases. However, the extent of this base reduction is difficult to estimate. In this paper we collect our own data from eBay.com on a "representative" commodity classification and a "typical" day. Our data consist of nearly twenty-one...

This paper presents a new dataset of fiscal consolidation for 17 OECD economies during 1978-2009. We focus on discretionary changes in taxes and government spending primarily motivated by a desire to reduce the budget deficit and not by a response to prospective economic conditions. To identify...

We examine a multinational firm which has a decreasing marginal cost, and the optimal sales tax policies of the regions where that firm operates. We show that the regions set higher sales taxes than those given by a cooperative equilibrium. Each region fails to fully internalize the effects of...

Exploiting a large panel with an exhaustive coverage of cross-border acquisitions across more than 30 countries over more than a decade, this paper provides a comprehensive view of the eect of taxation on the desire of multinational enterprises to invest abroad. By considering the dierences...

This paper addresses two fundamental issues in indirect tax design. It first revisits the case for reduced rates on items especially important to the poor, establishing conditions under which even very crudely targeted spending measures better serve their interests. It then explores the welfare...

We study nonlinear income taxation in a Roy model in which agents’ productivity is sector-specific. We show that when income taxes can be sector-specific, the Diamond-Mirrlees theorem (according to which the second-best displays production efficiency) fails: social welfare (be it Rawlsian or...

State borders create a discontinuous tax treatment of retail sales. In a Nash game, local tax rates will be higher on the low-state-tax side of a border. Local taxes will decrease from the nearest high-tax border and increase from the low-tax border. Using driving time from state borders and all...

We investigate the relation between changes in tax composition and long-run economic growth using a new dataset covering a broad cross-section of countries with different income levels. We specifically consider 69 countries with at least 20 years of observations on total tax revenue during the...

Belarus was hard hit by the global economic crisis. An exceptional access Stand-By Arrangement (SBA) was, therefore, agreed in early 2009. The program was generally successful and most program conditions were met. The program was overall well designed, but with some shortcomings. While in part...