Using household-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we estimate the extent to which medical expenses are responsible for driving households to bankruptcy. Our results suggest that an increase of 10 percent in medical debts would cause a 27 percent increase in the filing...

This paper develops a theoretical and an empirical model to study the effect of higher employment protection on investments in tertiary education. The mechanism driving this link is the effect of employment protection on worker flows. Worker flows (which are synonymous with job flows in my...

In this paper, we provide a brief overview of U.S. tax policy in relation to other OECD countries and also in some cases, in relation to world averages. The U.S. tax code emerges in our analysis is exceptional in many regards. Most countries have gradually moved toward collecting a large share...

Using a unique, self-compiled dataset on international tax rates, we explore the link between taxes and manufacturing wages for a panel of 65 countries over 25 years. We find, controlling for other macroeconomic variables, that wages are significantly responsive to corporate taxation. Higher...

This article is the first to show that foreign investors care about economic freedoms, rather than political freedoms, in making decisions about where to locate capital. Hence more democratic countries may receive less Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows if economic freedoms are not...

This paper measures the incidence of a carbon tax on gasoline using current income and two measures of lifetime income to rank households. Our results suggest that carbon taxes on gasoline are more regressive when annual income is used as a measure of economic welfare than when lifetime income...

This paper uses an audit sample and a consumer survey to study the intriguing market of online prescription drugs facing US customers, and assesses the role that certification agencies play in online drug markets. On the supply side, we acquire samples of five popular brand-name prescription...

Given the increasing use of stock options in executive compensation, we examine how taxes influence the choice of compensation and document that income deferral is an important margin of adjustment in response to tax rate changes. To account for this option in the empirical analysis, we explore...

We examine the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on part-time employment. Because the ACA's employer health insurance mandate applies to individuals who work 30 or more hours per week, employers may try to avoid the mandate by cutting workers' hours below the 30-hour threshold in order to...