The conventional wisdom is that market forces cause cities to be inefficiently large, and public policy should limit city sizes. The foundation for this argument is based on the unrealistic assumptions that city sites are homogeneous, federal taxes are absent, and individuals get free land to...

We quantify the intended and unintended consequences to firms of increasing tax information disclosure to the IRS. Our empirical strategy leverages an exogenously staggered adoption of a redesigned tax form. We find that the redesign was successful at increasing compliance after 2011 among some...

We investigate the tax implications for the new recreational marijuana industry in the United States, which reached a size of \$9 billion in 2017. We exploit administrative data from Washington state to evaluate market conduct, and we estimate the elasticity of supply to be 1.46. In addition, we...

This paper identifies and estimates two mechanisms by which the federal income tax system has affected consumption inequality between 1968 and 2010. In particular, we refer to changes in the tax system due to changes in the tax code as active and changes due to changes in income distribution as...

Investor-level taxation may distort merger and acquisition decisions when capital gains are taxed at a preferable rate, relative to dividends. The intuition is that the value of a target's assets depends on whether the target is acquired. If it is acquired, then the firm's equity is taxed at the...

Firms rarely cut compensation, so little is known about the after-effects when compensation reductions do occur. We use commission reductions at a sales firm to estimate how work effort and turnover change. In response to an 18% decline in sales commissions, corresponding to a 7% decline in...

Revenue volatility affects the welfare of U.S. states, which typically do not smooth their expenditures over the cycle but instead spend revenues as received. Between 2000 and 2014 U.S. state tax revenue volatility increased to 10.8% of revenues, up from 2.9% in the previous three decades. This...

State tax revenues continue, since the Great Recession, to experience elevated volatility relative to previous decades. The elevated tax revenue volatility is due to both economic uncertainty and the riskiness of the tax portfolios state governments are holding. Since the Great Recession, 18...