We assess the Covid-19 pandemic's implications for state government sales and income tax revenues. We estimate that the economic declines implied by recent forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office will lead to a shortfall of roughly $106 billion in states' sales and income tax revenues for...

This paper documents facts about the structure of business taxation in China using administrative tax data from 2007 to 2011 from the State Taxation Administration. We first document the importance of different business taxes across industries. While corporate income taxes play an important role...

This paper investigates the impact of changes in the level of taxation on economic activity. We use the narrative record -- presidential speeches, executive-branch documents, and Congressional reports -- to identify the size, timing, and principal motivation for all major postwar tax policy...

An important goal of the desegregation of schools following the Supreme Court's decision in Brown vs. Board of Education was to improve the quality of the schools black children attended. This paper uses a new dataset to examine the effects of desegregation on public and private enrollment and...

This paper tests the hypothesis that the salience of a tax system affects equilibrium tax rates. To do this, I analyze how toll rates change after toll facilities adopt electronic toll collection. Unlike manual toll collection, in which the driver must hand over cash at the toll collection...

To study the role of tax professionals, we merge tax records of 2.5 million taxpayers in Italy with the respective audit files from the tax revenue agency. Our data covers the entire population of sole proprietorship taxpayers in seven regions, followed over seven fiscal years. We first document...

Between 2020 and 2029, the IRS will fail to collect nearly $7.5 trillion of taxes it is due. It is not possible to calculate with precision how much of this "tax gap" could be collected. This paper offers a naïve approach. The analysis suggests that with feasible changes in policy, the IRS...

Empirical research in public economics, including our own, often uses variation in state and local taxes as an empirical laboratory to estimate causal relationships. A key concern is that other taxes might change at the same time. To assess this concern, we develop a dataset of state (1977-2022)...

As a share of GDP, U.S. federal tax revenues from nonfinancial corporations have held relatively constant since the early 1980s, after falling precipitously during the late 1960s and the 1970s. But this relative constancy masks offsetting trends in the ratio of nonfinancial C corporation profits...