In 2001, many households received rebate checks as advanced payments of the benefit of the new, 10 percent federal income tax bracket. A survey conducted at the time the rebates were mailed finds that few households said that the rebate led them mostly to increase spending. A follow-up survey in...

Are individuals who trust others better off than those who do not? Do trustworthy people prosper more than untrustworthy ones? We first pose these questions in a search model where individuals face repeated choices between trusting (initiating an investment transaction) and not trusting, and...

An optimal linear world income tax that maximizes a border-neutral social welfare function provides a drastic reduction in world consumption inequality, dropping the Gini coefficient from 0.69 to 0.25. In contrast an optimal decentralized (i.e., within countries) redistribution has miniscule...

Many households received income tax rebates in 2001 of $300 or $600. These rebates represented advance payments of the tax cut from the new 10 percent tax bracket. Based on a survey of a representative sample of households, this paper finds that only 22 percent of households receiving the rebate...

This paper seeks to clarify the extent to which the rule for providing public goods ought to correct for the distortionary cost of raising funds. We argue that, in evaluating public projects, the marginal cost of funds (MCF) concept must be supplemented by a symmetrical concept, which we label...

This paper examines data from U.S. federal tax returns to shed light on whether the timing of death is responsive to its tax consequences. We investigate the temporal pattern of deaths around the time of changes in the estate tax system periods when living longer, or dying sooner, could...

Using estate tax return data from 1916 to 1996, we investigate the impact of the estate tax on reported estates, which reflects the impact of the tax on both wealth accumulation and avoidance. An aggregate measure of reported estates is generally negatively correlated with summary measures of...

The strength of the behavioral response to a tax rate change depends on the environment individuals operate in, and may be manipulated by instruments controlled by the government. We first derive a measure of the social benefit to affecting this elasticity. The paper then examines this effect in...

Evidence from daily market data is consistent with the view that the implicit tax rate on 5-year municipal bonds was affected by the chance of a flat tax becoming law, as proxied by the price of Steve Forbes' shares on the Iowa Electronic Market for political candidates; the spread was also...

Two well-noted phenomena of recent decades are the increasing concentration of personal income and the declining rate of corporate profitability. This paper investigates to what extent these two trends have a common explanation extent these two trends have a common explanation-shifting of income...