We measure the response of household spending to the economic stimulus payments (ESPs) disbursed in mid-2008, using special questions added to the Consumer Expenditure Survey and variation arising from the randomized timing of when the payments were disbursed. We find that, on average,...

In this paper we examine the effect of the income tax on charitable giving. An important challenge in this literature has been to estimate the long-run response of giving to a persistent change in tax-price, which can be difficult to distinguish from intertemporal substitution arising from...

Most indexes in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) use a form of the "matched-model" approach. It is frequently assumed that this approach accurately reflects inflation for items that have no major trend in quality. In this paper we investigate that hypothesis using CPI data for retail food items....

This paper updates a review conducted by CBO in 1996 in which the agency evaluated the academic research on the effects of changes in after-tax wages on labor supply in the U.S. economy. That review concluded that substitution elasticities were larger in absolute value than income elasticities...

This study uses a large panel of tax returns from 1999 to 2008 to investigate how taxes affect the decision to realize gains. The study distinguishes the persistent effect of tax changes from the transitory effect. Similar to earlier studies in the literature, we use the generalized Tobit model...

Recent years have seen tremendous changes in tax law. For example, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA 2001) phases out the estate tax over 10 years until it is fully repealed in 2010. Those changes reduce federal revenues but also alter various incentives. For...

Labor supply elasticities are often used to evaluate the effect of changes in tax rates on the total hours worked in the economy. Historically, married women have tended to have larger labor supply elasticities than their spouses because they were the secondary earners in a couple. However,...

We adapt techniques from the literature on chaos and nonlinear dynamics to detect misspecification in models of serially independent data by checking for dependence between the regressors and disturbances. Our tests are nonparametric in that they determine whether the distribution of the...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to compare the use of critical incident technique (CIT) for gathering student feedback in higher education (HE) with the more traditional and commonly used questionnaire survey method. Design/methodology/approach – The investigation involved a critical...