These are brief comments on an excellent paper by Jeffrey Liebman and Richard Zeckhauser, prepared for a conference sponsored by the Urban Institute and Brookings on tax and health care policy. Liebman and Zeckhauser summarize the complexities involved in making optimal health insurance...

The most common use of the insights of behavioral economics in the cause of fundamental tax reform has been to argue for the employment of ad hoc tax-favored savings vehicles - such as individual retirement accounts (IRAs), medical, and educational savings accounts, and so on - within an...

A large telephone survey conducted after the attacks of September 11 suggests that the willingness to tolerate discrimination varies significantly across domains, with a very high tolerance of discrimination against poorly educated immigrants and a strikingly low tolerance of discrimination...

These are slides from a presentation to the President's Advisory Panel on Tax Reform, given in Washington D.C. on May 11, 2005, updated, with additional slides, and sources at the end. The principal goal is to summarize the mechanics and analytics of a consumed or cash-flow income tax, a...

This article aims to expand research about perceptions of discrimination both substantively and methodologically: beyond the domains of race and ethnicity, and relying partly on Web-based surveys. Methods. Parallel surveys were conducted over the telephone and the World-Wide Web, using standard...

We argue that a spending tax, as opposed to an income or wage tax, is the “last best hope” for a return to significantly more progressive marginal tax rates than obtain today. The simple explanation for this central claim looks to incentive effects, especially for “rich people,” as both...

These are powerpoint slides from a presentation at a joint UCLA-Tax Policy Center Conference on Tax Policy in the Obama Era. The basic insight is that it will be difficult to raise significant revenue through the current tax system. Behavioral perspectives suggest that a series of small (or...

This brief commentary on David Weisbach's essay (available on ssrn at http://ssrn.com/abstract=911604) first identifies Weisbach's contribution as stating an Equivalence Theorem: putting aside matters affecting the taxation of the pure riskless rate of return, any method of implementing an...