Search Results
Journal Article
Marketization of Home Production and Gender Gaps in Working Hours
Gender gaps in working hours vary widely across member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. This article summarizes the key results from Duval-Hernández, Fang, and Ngai (2021), who study the source of cross-country differences and what kind of policies can reduce the gap in working hours between women and men.
Discussion Paper
Marketization of Home Production and Gender Gaps in Working Hours
Gender gaps in working hours vary widely across member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. This article summarizes the key results from Duval-Hernández, Fang, and Ngai (2021), who study the source of cross-country differences and what kind of policies can reduce the gap in working hours between women and men.
Journal Article
Recent and Near-Term Fiscal Policy: Headwind or Tailwind?
The federal government routinely uses government spending and taxes to help offset the highs and lows of the U.S. business cycle. While government spending typically increases during a recession, the magnitude of the fiscal expansion during the pandemic recession was outsized compared with the average historical pattern. This likely contributed to real economic growth and possibly inflation during the recovery. Over the next few years, U.S. fiscal policy is expected to be roughly neutral, providing neither a tailwind nor headwind to the overall economy.
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 several surveys, subsamples, and years. We find that the discrepancies are economically relevant for the statistics of interest. We investigate reasons for ...
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
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
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 -
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.
Journal Article
Savings programs associated with VITA
There are thousands of Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) sites across the country and more than 250 in Texas. Located at libraries, community colleges, churches and community-based organizations, these sites pop up during tax season in areas accessible to low- and moderate-income (LMI) workers.
Journal Article
Did the Fiscal Stimulus Work?
Billions were spent to recover from the Great Recession. How can we know whether taxpayers got a decent bang for the buck? More than seven years after the enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, economists, legislators, and the American people continue to debate the effectiveness of the measure. The largest U.S. fiscal stimulus since the 1930s, the Recovery Act pumped hundreds of billions of dollars of federal spending and tax cuts into the economy in an effort to stem the massive job losses and steep drop in economic output that characterized the Great Recession. The ...