There has been a growing consensus among academics, analysts, and policymakers that the official federal budget estimates should reflect the “cost of risk” — the amount that the private market would demand to bear risk. The result would be to add tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars...

This analysis explores how health status affects the marginal utility of income. To analyze this question, I employ a new survey of subjective well-being, the Princeton Affect and Time Survey (PATS), which asks people to report the strength of a number of different emotions as they went about...

One of the largest revenue raisers in the House Republicans' framework for business tax reform is a “border adjustment.” However, projections of revenue from the border adjustment overstate revenue in two ways. The medium-term projections assume that there will be no or very limited...

The 2017 tax legislation brought sweeping changes to the rules for taxing individuals and business, the deductibility of state and local taxes, and the international tax regime. The complex legislation was drafted and passed through a rushed and secretive process intended to limit public comment...

Taxpayers should expect capital gains rates to fluctuate in light of frequent historical changes and the current divergence of rates preferred by Democrats and Republicans. This paper is the first to model the effect of such rate uncertainty on the realization incentives of asset holders and...

The Trump Administration faces mounting pressure from conservative thinkers and activists — including calls from its own National Economic Council director — to promulgate a U.S. Treasury Department regulation that indexes capital gains for inflation. Proponents of such a move — which is...

In this article, we discuss the inconsistent use of the current policy baseline by policymakers, which undermines budget enforcement and represents a deep violation of Senate norms. We further describe how the potentially dangerous disruption to the budget process provides an opportunity to...

There is widespread confusion both in policy circles and in the academic literature about how to measure the progressivity of a tax change. The confusion is particularly vexing because policymakers and analysts often rely on progressivity as a guidepost in constructing and analyzing policy, but...

According to the most recent literature, one of the primary systems for getting Americans to save more — a system of tax-preferred retirement accounts — is fundamentally broken and should be abandoned. This system of 401(k)s, Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs), and other tax-preferred...

In this article, Glogower and Kamin respond to Michael S. Knoll's recent argument that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act creates “very close to a level playing field” between passthrough and corporate entities, and they explain why some high-income owners may achieve tax savings by using corporations