The two main workhorses of state tax systems are levies on sales and individual incomes. In this paper we develop and implement a coherent methodology for characterizing these systems. The measures thus generated are used to show how the various systems differ across states, and how they evolved...

A notable feature and principal virtue of Tax by Design is its system-wide perspective on different elements of the tax system. This review essay builds on this trait and offers a more explicit foundation for the report's general approach, drawing on a distribution-neutral methodology that is...

This paper describes a new household-level data file based on merged information from the IRS Individual Tax File, the Current Population Survey, the National Medical Expenditure Survey, and the Consumer Expenditure Survey. This new file includes descriptive data on household income as well as...

Ignoring tax avoidance possibilities, a value-added tax and a cash-flow income tax have identical behavioral and distributional consequences. Yet the available means of tax avoidance under each are very different. Under a VAT, avoidance occurs through cross-border shopping, whereas under an...

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 highlights the significance of open-economy considerations in the analysis of tax reforms. It focuses on domestic and international consequences of revenue-neutral conversions between income and value-added tax systems. The principal conclusion of this investigation is that the...

The rapid rise in sales over the Internet has generated debate over the taxation of such transactions since the buyers usually pay no sales tax. This paper uses new data on the purchase decisions of approximately 25,000 online users to examine the effects that local sales taxes have on Internet...

In this paper we evaluate the incidence of a large cut in value-added taxes (VAT) for French sit-down restaurants. In contrast to previous studies that focus on prices only, we estimate its effect on four groups: workers, firm owners, consumers and suppliers of material goods. Using a...

This paper shows that prices respond more to increases than to decreases in Value-Added Taxes (VATs). First, using two plausibly exogenous VAT changes, we show that prices respond twice as much to VAT increases than to VAT decreases. Second, we show that this asymmetry results in higher...

Using comprehensive high-frequency state and local sales tax data, we show that shopping behavior responds strongly to changes in sales tax rates. Even though sales taxes are not observed in posted prices and have a wide range of rates and exemptions, consumers adjust in many dimensions. They...