The purpose of this paper is to compare the distributional characteristics of two presidential candidates’ proposed reforms to the US federal individual income tax. Using an anonymous sample of tax return data from the Brookings-Urban Institute Tax Policy Center and the Center’s simulations...

addresses two long-standing positive questions in public finance: 1) Why is the property tax, despite widespread popular complaints against its fairness, the almost exclusive tax instrument used by local governments; and 2) why do we consistently observe higher levels of governments (states)...

This paper models the fertility decision of individuals who differ in their wage rate and their intensity of preferences for rearing children, and whose utility of having a child out of wedlock depends on the level of “social approval” associated with doing so. This social approval in turn...