Our answer is “less often than you might think.” We qualify and defend this answer in several steps. First, we offer some suggestive evidence that major scholarly contributions in law and economics have had relatively more influence with academics than with judges. For example, ranking...

In this article, Clarke and Fox examine the American Rescue Plan Act’s restrictions on state tax cuts, arguing that the restrictions are a variation on more familiar maintenance-of-effort provisions. These provisions are common, and are designed to help ensure that federal grants supplement...

This paper presents the results of an original survey experiment on whether the public prefers “tax expenditures” to “direct outlays” — that is, whether members of the public are more likely to support government spending that takes the form of a tax credit rather than a check or cash....

In theory, the U.S. tax system aims to attribute and tax all business income to individuals. But the tax treatment of this income varies. Pass-through income is taxed when earned; capital-gains income is taxed when realized; dividends when distributed; other forms of business income may escape...

In this essay I examine new research on tax expenditures. By utilizing survey experiments, several new studies have explored when and why the public prefers spending programs organized as tax credits rather than direct expenditures, even when the substance and cost of the policies are the same....