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Working Paper
Estimating the Intergenerational Elasticity and Rank Association in the U.S.: Overcoming the Current Limitations of Tax Data
Ideal estimates of the intergenerational elasticity (IGE) in income require a large panel of income data covering the entire working lifetimes for two generations. Previous studies have demonstrated that using short panels and covering only certain portions of the life cycle can lead to considerable bias. A recent influential study by Chetty et al. (2014) using tax data estimates the IGE in family income for the entire U.S. to be 0.344, considerably lower than most previous estimates. Despite the seeming advantages of extremely large samples of administrative tax data, I demonstrate that the ...
Working Paper
Taxing top earners: a human capital perspective
We assess the consequences of substantially increasing the marginal tax rate on U.S. top earners using a human capital model. The top of the model Laffer curve occurs at a 53 percent top tax rate. Tax revenues and the tax rate at the top of the Laffer curve are smaller compared to an otherwise similar model that ignores the possibility of skill change in response to a tax reform. We also show that if one applies the methods used by Diamond and Saez (2011) to provide quantitative guidance for setting the tax rate on top earners to model data then the resulting tax rate exceeds the tax rate at ...
Journal Article
Housing affordability: recommendations for new research to guide policy
This article highlights areas where economic research is needed to guide federal policymakers addressing the challenge of improving housing affordability. The author places these research recommendations in the framework of five key issues, reflecting policymakers? need to identify a rationale for government action; to employ a single, clear measure to gauge affordability; to understand the unintended consequences of current housing policies; to ensure that the political environment is considered when developing policy; and to decide whether to use housing finance reform as a means of ...
Working Paper
Has COVID Reversed Gentrification in Major U.S. Cities? An Empirical Examination of Residential Mobility in Gentrifying Neighborhoods During the COVID-19 Crisis
This paper examines whether neighborhoods that had been gentrifying lost their appeal during the pandemic because of COVID-induced health risks and increased work-from-home arrangements. By following the mobility pattern of residents in gentrifying neighborhoods in 39 major U.S. cities, we note a larger increase of 1.2 percentage points in the outmigration rate from gentrifying neighborhoods by the end of 2021, relative to nongentrifying ones, with out-of-city moves accounting for over 71 percent of the increased flight. The share of out-of-city moves into gentrifying neighborhoods also ...
Working Paper
Report on the Potential Impacts of Property Tax Abatement on Rental Housing Construction in Boston
Boston’s high housing costs reflect a historic failure to build enough units to satisfy demand. Interest rates and construction costs have risen recently, and the flow of new market-rate residential housing projects has slowed. To spur more construction, the City of Boston is considering various policy options. Our committee was asked by Boston Mayor Michelle Wu to assess the market impacts of one of these options: real estate tax abatements. This report presents our analysis of the likely effects on the number of units constructed and the costs to taxpayers of various tax abatement ...
Working Paper
Employment and Welfare Effects of the Quota for Disabled Workers in Brazil
I study the effect of a quota for disabled workers on the labor market and on welfare. Using a task-based model, I show that the effect of a quota will depend on the productivity of disabled workers and their labor supply elasticity. I estimate the productivity of disabled workers using variation from inspections of the quota. I find that the quota increased the hiring of disabled workers, but it reduced wages and employment of non-disabled workers, suggesting that the quota reduced firms’ productivity. I estimate the labor supply elasticity of disabled workers using heterogeneous exposure ...
Discussion Paper
Tax Reform and U.S. Effective Profit Taxes: From Low to Lower
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) reduced the federal corporate profit tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Adding in state profit taxes, the overall U.S. tax rate went from 39 percent, one of the highest rates in the world, to 26 percent, about the average rate abroad. The implications of the new law for U.S. competitiveness depend on how these statutory tax rates compare with the actual rates faced by U.S. and foreign companies. To address this question, this post presents new evidence on tax payments as a share of profits, as well as analytical measures of tax impacts on profitability. ...
Journal Article
Quantitative Macro Versus Sufficient Statistic Approach: A Laffer Curve Dilemma?
This article highlights two approaches to tax policy for the top 1 percent of earners. On the one hand are dynamic general equilibrium models requiring complicated calibration and simulation algorithms and strong structural assumptions. On the other hand is the sufficient statistic approach, which attempts to parsimoniously reach the trinity of empirical, theoretical, and policy relevance. The author illustrates ongoing work highlighting explicit connections between these two approaches.
Working Paper
Dynamic Sales Tax Competition: Evidence from Panel Data at the Border
We examine both vertical and horizontal tax competition over time by studying the strategic response of county sales taxation to state sales taxes and to cross-border neighboring municipalities’ combined (state and county) taxes. Using county and state sales tax data from 2003 through 2009, we employ both static and dynamic panel analysis as well as an instrumental variables approach in combination with a border analysis. Our results confirm the presence of tax competition in the cross section, as previous studies have found. Results from the fixed-effects and dynamic panel analysis also ...
Newsletter
Land Value Taxes—What They Are and Where They Come From
Changes to property tax structures, including the introduction of split-rate taxation, have been seeing increased interest from policymakers. Split-rate property taxation is rooted in the concept of land value taxation, which is an alternative to the form of property taxation used in most U.S. communities. In this Chicago Fed Letter, we explain what these alternatives to traditional property taxation are and provide some history on their implementation in the U.S.