What have been the economic impacts of existing government tax and expenditure programs? Among the questions looked at here:

To what degree have existing social insurance programs such as Social Security, disability insurance, and unemployment insurance helped stabilize household consumption? What economic distortions are created in the process?
How can the provision of key public services such as education and health care be made more cost effective?
How have existing safety-net programs done in alleviating poverty and improving the future success of poor children? To what degree do these programs distort household incentives?
What have been the economic impacts of recent and proposed tax reforms?

Latest articles

What Goes Up May Not Come Down: Asymmetric Incidence of Value-Added Taxes

Evidence from Finland indicates that prices, and profits, respond more strongly to a VAT increase than a VAT decrease—and that short-term policy changes can have longer-term effects Our analysis relies on two main approaches. First, we analyze the effect of a large VAT decrease in the hairdressing sector in Finland, which was later reversed. This […]

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Wealth Taxation and Wealth Accumulation: Theory and Evidence from Denmark

What are the economic effects of taxing household wealth? While an enormous literature estimates the impact of taxes on labor supply and taxable income, much less is known about how taxes affect the supply of capital. The lack of evidence makes it hard to assess the desirability of taxing top-end wealth, a proposal that has […]

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Taxing family income: the effects on marriage and how time and resources are shared within households

In all OECD countries, the central government levies a tax on personal income, with the associated revenues constituting a very significant share of overall government revenue. There is much debate and disagreement among both policy-makers and economists about how incomes should be taxed. This is reflected in important differences in how governments tax personal income […]

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How do American families spend food benefits?

More than 19 million US households are enrolled in SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides monthly benefits to buy groceries at a wide range of retailers. This research tests how recipients’ spending changes after they join the program – and in particular whether SNAP benefits affect their purchases of food by more than an equivalent cash benefit. The results indicate that a family receiving, say, a $200 monthly SNAP benefit can be expected to increase its monthly expenditure on groceries by $100, far more than the $20 expected rise in food spending from a cash benefit of comparable size.

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The incentives of centralized school admissions systems

Many school districts have adopted centralized admissions systems to coordinate student assignments. These systems ask students to rank the schools they would like to attend and then use an algorithm to coordinate placement. These algorithms consider student preferences, eligibility criteria and school capacities. In order to better understand student preferences and the performance of various systems, this study develops a general methodology to analyze the reports on student preferences submitted to school choice systems.

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Tax evasion and inequality

How widespread is tax evasion – and what does that imply for the true extent of inequality? This research explores these questions by analyzing a unique dataset of leaked customer lists from offshore financial institutions matched to administrative wealth records in Scandinavia. The results show that offshore tax evasion is highly concentrated among the rich. The top 0.01% of households by wealth evade about a quarter of the taxes they owe, largely by concealing assets and investment income abroad. Top wealth shares in Denmark, Norway and Sweden increase substantially when adding back these unreported assets, highlighting the need to take account of tax evasion to measure inequality accurately.

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The costs of public sector patronage: lessons from the British Empire

Civil servants constitute a key element of state capacity, with the responsibility for raising government revenues, providing public services and implementing reforms. But what happens to their performance when they are appointed to office less on the basis of their talents than on their social connections to powerful patrons? This research examines the costs of patronage through the lens of a historical bureaucracy that spanned the globe: Britain’s Colonial Office. The research combines newly digitized personnel and public finance data from the administration of the British Empire over the period 1854-1966 to show how patronage influenced the promotion and performance of colonial governors.

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Measuring the impact of US state taxation on business activity

There is considerable anecdotal evidence of US companies moving from high-tax states to low-tax states, but what do the data reveal about the impact of state taxation on economic activity? This research finds that firms subject to state-level corporate taxation respond to higher corporate tax rates by closing establishments and reducing employment; those subject only to state-level personal income taxation respond similarly to individual income tax rates, though to a lesser extent. Since half of these responses are due to reallocation of business activity to lower-tax states, tax competition across states clearly plays a first-order role in corporate decision-making.

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Optimal timing of unemployment benefits: evidence from Sweden

A public program of unemployment benefits aims to protect people against job loss, but it should ideally be designed so that it doesn’t encourage them to stay out of work too much longer than they otherwise would. This research explores how policy can achieve the ideal balance between maximizing the insurance value of benefits while minimizing the incentive cost. Analyzing data from Sweden on unemployment, consumption, income, and wealth, the findings indicate that contrary to recent reforms that push towards making the generosity of benefits decline over the unemployment spell, it is more socially desirable to reduce benefits for the short-term unemployed in order to raise them for the long-term unemployed.

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US Treasury auctions: measuring the effectiveness of primary markets for government securities

How should government bonds be sold? Research typically emphasizes how the auction design affects outcomes depending on the nature of demand and the competitive environment. This study combines models of strategic bidding in Treasury auctions with detailed bidding data to construct empirical measures that reveal the effectiveness of auctions. Applying these methods to data on US Treasury auctions shows that the gains from optimizing the auction mechanism are no more than 5 basis points. The research also quantifies the advantage enjoyed by primary dealers in these markets, who are able to observe the ‘willingness-to-pay’ of their customers who route their bids through them.

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