This article explores a long-standing research and policy question on whether tax incentives for charitable giving are desirable from legal and economic perspectives. The author discusses legal and empirical aspects that are important in designing tax incentives for charitable giving. Firstly,...

Cross-sectional earnings inequality has risen sharply since the late 1970s in the United States. It remains an open question how this development has affected the insurance and income redistribution roles played by Social Security. The paper's first question is: How have the government...

We argue the revenue potential from increasing tax rates on capital gains may be substantially greater than previously understood. First, many prior studies focus primarily on short-run taxpayer responses, and so miss revenue from gains that are deferred when rates change. Second, the...

The U.S. economy is growing more slowly than it can and should be growing because it does not invest enough in infrastructure, science, and education. There is an important procedural obstacle to funding public investments — a process of scoring the economic effect of legislation. This process...

This paper presents a general framework for characterizing the optimal pattern of subsidies for poverty alleviation under budgetary constraints and suggests possible reforms for the existing pattern of subsidies. The government may subsidize or tax goods in order to meet its objectives. The...

This paper outlines the methodology used by the OECD in its Taxing Wages publication, compares this approach to other measures of the effective tax rate on labour and uses recent results to illustrate its use. It argues that the strength of this methodology lies in its ability to make...

Many predictions and conclusions in climate change literature have been made on the basis of theoretical analyses and quantitative models that assume exogenous technological change. One may wonder if those policy prescriptions hold in the more realistic case of endogenously evolving...