During and immediately after the recessions of 2001 and 2007-2009, tax amnesties in the American states rebounded in popularity. Is tax amnesty a good fiscal policy? To address this question, we review the experience of US state tax amnesty between 1982 and 2012 and identify the literature that...

Until the early 1990s, the discussions on fiscal policy primarily centered on the functions of economic stabilization, income redistribution and resource allocation. Long-term growth was not usually viewed as an end itself, and fiscal policy was often not sufficiently tailored to the different...