Many U.S. states and countries around the world use non-monetary sanctions to encourage tax compliance, including public disclosure, license suspension, and withholding of other government-provided benefits or privileges. Little is known about the effectiveness of these programs. Using...

This Article critiques existing and nascent rules limiting federal agency authority in the name of federalism. Those rules presently bind agencies even more tightly than Congress. For instance, while Congress can regulate to the limits of its commerce power with a sufficiently clear statement of...

This Article presents the first empirical examination of giving to § 501(c)(4) organizations, which have recently become important players in U.S. politics. Gifts to c(4) organizations are highly elastic to the after-tax price of charitable giving. At the lower end of the observed tax price...

Governments can use regulation to pay for public goods out of the pockets of consumers, rather than taxpayers. For example, the Affordable Care Act underwrites care for women and the infirm through higher insurance premium payments by healthy men. Building on a classic article from Richard...

Do small-dollar donors seek out potentially adverse information about organizations making fundraising appeals? Do they react when it is readily available? Do they draw negative inferences when critical information is not available? To answer these questions, we consider previously unexamined...

American philanthropic institutions control upwards of a trillion dollars of wealth. Because contributions to these entities are deductible from both income and estate taxes, and the entities' earnings are tax-free, that trillion dollars is heavily underwritten by contemporary taxpayers. Law...

There seems to be a growing social consensus that the U.S. imprisons far too many people for far too long. But reform efforts have slowed in the face of a challenging question: how can we reduce reliance on prisons while still discouraging crime, particularly violent crime? Through the 1970's,...

This is a condensed version of the authors' longer work, quot;Administrative Law's Federalism: Preemption, Non delegation, and Agencies at the Edge of Federal Power,quot; Duke Law Journal, Vol. 57, p. 1933, 2008. It offers a short, accessible overview of our argument that (contra the apparent...

Innovations in government produce positive externalities for other jurisdictions. Theory therefore predicts that local government will tend to produce a lower than optimal amount of innovation, as officials will prefer to free-ride on innovation by others. As Susan Rose-Ackerman observed in...

This Article argues that, contrary to the consensus of economists and many legal scholars, the norm of 'horizontal equity' in taxation has independent meaning as a default rule in favor of existing arrangements. Although it has long been said, and widely thought, that tax should be fair in its...