This paper uses highly detailed, quarterly data for five major industrialized economies to estimate the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on import protection policies over 1988:Q1 - 2010:Q4. First, estimates on a pre-Great Recession sample of data provide evidence of two key relationships....

This paper contributes to the small empirical literature that attempts to estimate tax reaction functions of national governments competing with other national governments. After presenting a simple theoretical model, we estimate reaction functions for European countries for a pure Nash model...

We use U.S. county-level data to estimate convergence rates for 22 individual states. We find significant heterogeneity. E.g., the California estimate is 19.9 percent and the New York estimate is 3.3 percent. Convergence rates are essentially uncorrelated with income levels.

We use US county level data (3,058 observations) from 1970 to 1998 to explore the relationship between economic growth and the extent of government employment at three levels: federal, state and local. We find that increases in federal, state and local government employments are all negatively...

Contrary to widespread belief, voting machines of older types, such as lever and punchcard systems, are not used in counties with lower income - and newer machines, such as optical scanners and electronic machines, are not used in richer counties. We provide an economic explanation for this and...

Previous research on optimal R&D subsidies has focussed on the long run. This paper characterizes the optimal time path of R&D subsidization in a semi-endogenous growth model, by exploiting a recently developed numerical method. Starting from the steady state under current R&D subsidization in...

The increase in international capital mobility over the past two decades has put pressure on the tax treatment of corporate equity income. Corporate-level taxes distort investment flows across locations and create opportunities for tax avoidance by shifting income across jurisdictions. Outward...

In August 2009 the Congressional Budget Offi ce warned that the budget was on an unsustainable path. Preventing federal debt from growing faster than the economy over the long-run requires large increases in revenues and/or decreases in spending. We explore, using the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy...