The median United States voter supports the legalization of marijuana, at least in part due to a desire to increase state tax revenues. However, states with legal markets have implemented wildly different regulatory schemes with tax rates ranging from 3.75 to 37 percent, indicating that policy...

Over the last few years, marijuana has become legally available for recreational use to roughly a quarter of Americans. Policy makers have long expressed concerns about the substantial external costs of alcohol, and similar costs could come with the liberalization of marijuana policy. Indeed,...

Marijuana is partially prohibited: though banned federally, it is available to 1 in 4 U.S. adults under state statutes. We measure the size of the interstate trade generated by state-level differences in legal status with a natural experiment: Oregon allowed stores to sell marijuana for...

This paper reviews recent economic research in tax compliance and enforcement. After briefly laying out the economics of tax evasion, it focuses on recent empirical contributions. It first discusses what methodologies and data have facilitated these contributions, and then presents critical...

Tax enforcement may affect both the behavior of those directly treated and of some taxpayers not directly treated but linked via a network to those who are treated. A large-scale randomized field experiment enables us to examine both the direct and network effects of letters and in-person visits...

This paper examines corporations' actions, and statements about actions, following the tax law change known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). Specifically, we examine four different outcomes—bonuses (or other actions that benefit workers), announcements of new investments, share...

We examine two Pakistani programs to explore the role of deterrence as well as social and psychological factors in the tax compliance behavior of agents. In the first of these programs, the government began revealing income tax paid by every taxpayer in the country. The second program publicly...

In this paper we develop some simple models of optimal tax and tariff policy in the presence of global corporations that operate in an imperfectly competitive environment. The models emphasize two important differences in the practical application of tax and tariff policy - tax, but not tariff,...

The empirical literature that seeks to measure the effective tax rate on new investment offers a striking paradox. On the one hand, summary measures of the effective tax rate on new investment are normally quite high. On the other hand, the amount of revenue actually collected from taxing...

At the end of 1983 Gallup polls showed that 52 percent of Americans thought that the probability of a world war in the next 10 years was 50% or higher; by 1989 the percentage had dropped to 29%. Fear of war of this pervasiveness is bound to have an effect on decisions about present versus...