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Journal Article
Taxing The 1 Percent
Raising taxes on top earners is often seen as a straightforward way to stem inequality. The trick is preserving efficient revenue generation and work incentives for the economy?s most productive contributors.
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.
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 ...
Could More Progressive Taxes Increase Income Inequality?
One paper posits that making taxes more progressive could boost lower-income households initially, but more money would eventually float to those with higher incomes.
Working Paper
The Macroeconomics of the Greek Depression
The Greek economy experienced a boom until 2007, followed by a prolonged depression resulting in a 25 percent shortfall of GDP by 2016. Informed by a detailed analysis of macroeconomic patterns in Greece, we estimate a rich dynamic general equilibrium model to assess quantitatively the sources of the boom and bust. Lower external demand for traded goods and contractionary fiscal policies account for the largest fraction of the Greek depression. A decline in total factor productivity, due primarily to lower factor utilization, substantially amplifies the depression. Given the significant ...
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. The level shock is similar to tax shocks found in the empirical literature--increasing the tax level is contractionary. On the other hand, an increase in tax progressivity is expansionary. When tax progressivity increases, the bottom of the income distribution experiences an increase in disposable income. Agents at the low end of the income distribution who have high marginal propensity to consume offset the decrease in consumption by the savers at the high ...
Journal Article
Taxes and the Fed
Working Paper
Tax Progressivity, Economic Booms, and Trickle-Up Economics
We study the macroeconomic and distributional effects of changes in income tax progressivity in the United States. We propose a method to decompose changes in the tax structure into orthogonal components measuring the level and progressivity of taxes. Estimating these components jointly with macroeconomic outcomes in a factor-augmented VAR, we find that tax level shocks are contractionary, while tax progressivity shocks are expansionary, raising output and consumption by shifting disposable income from high to low-income households. Despite being revenue neutral by construction, progressivity ...
Tax, transfer programs explain why Western Europeans work less than Americans
Western Europe differs from the United States not only in consumption tax, income tax and social security systems but also in the total factor productivity—a measure of productivity—for market production in which most European countries are low.
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 ...