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Individuals, married couples respond differently to U.S. income tax changes
Changes in effective income taxes can impact labor supply with different outcomes for married couples and singles, and changes can have a particularly notable impact on married women.
Discussion Paper
Did Tax Reform Raise the Cost of Owning a Home?
The 2018 slowdown in the housing market has been a subject of intense interest to the press and policymakers, including articles reporting a slowing in house price growth and a decline in home construction. Today we follow up on our colleagues' research on whether the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) has contributed to a slowdown in the housing market, looking closely at what price signals tell us about the trade-off between owning and renting.
Working Paper
Heterogeneity in the Pass-Through from Oil to Gasoline Prices: A New Instrument for Estimating the Price Elasticity of Gasoline Demand
We propose a new instrument for estimating the price elasticity of gasoline demand that exploits systematic differences across U.S. states in the pass-through of oil price shocks to retail gasoline prices. We show that these differences are primarily driven by the cost of producing and distributing gasoline, which varies with states’ access to oil and gasoline transportation infrastructure, refinery technology and environmental regulations, creating cross-sectional gasoline price shocks in response to an aggregate oil price shock. Time-varying estimates do not support the view that the ...
Journal Article
Pricing Vice: Can \\"sin taxes\\" be good for your health and the economy?
It's rare for a tax to become trendy. But that's what's been going on in cities across the United States when it comes to soda taxes -
Working Paper
What Do Survey Data Tell Us about US Businesses?
This paper examines the reliability of survey data on business incomes, valuations, and rates of return, which are key inputs for studies of wealth inequality and entrepreneurial choice. We compare survey responses of business owners with available data from administrative tax records, brokered private business sales, and publicly traded company filings and document problems due to nonrepresentative samples and measurement errors across all surveys, subsamples, and years. We find that the discrepancies are economically relevant for the statistics of interest. We investigate reasons for these ...
Journal Article
A Taxing Question for the Fed
The Fed has long emphasized uncertainty in assessing the economic effects of tax cuts. Both history and theory might help explain why
Journal Article
Interview: Alan Auerbach
Alan Auerbach enrolled in college at Yale planning to focus on math and science. But in his second year, he figured he should sign up for a course in something else for the sake of the school's distribution requirements. So he tried introductory economics without having a clear idea of what economics was — and discovered he enjoyed it.
Working Paper
Taxes, Subsidies, and Gender Gaps in Hours and Wages
Using micro data from 17 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, this paper documents a negative cross-country correlation between gender ratios in market hours and wages. We find that market hours by women and the size of the service sector that produces close substitutes to home production are important for the gender differences in market hours across countries. We quantify the role played by taxes and subsidies to family care on the two gender ratios in a multisector model with home production. Higher taxes and lower subsidies reduce the marketization of ...
Working Paper
Tax Progressivity, Economic Booms, and Trickle-Up Economics
We propose a method to decompose changes in the tax structure into orthogonal components measuring the level and progressivity of taxes. Similar to tax shocks found in the existing empirical literature, the level shock is contractionary. The tax progressivity shock is expansionary: Increasing tax progressivity raises (lowers) disposable income at the bottom (top) end of the income distribution by shifting the tax burden from the bottom to the top. If agents' marginal propensity to consume falls with income, the rise in consumption at the bottom more than compensates for the decline in ...
The Puzzle of Multinationals’ Profits: Why Tax Havens Yield Higher Returns
An analysis examines how U.S. multinationals’ tax and profit-shifting strategies might affect yields on direct investment in tax havens versus G7 economies.