Top economists provide much-needed guidance--and some surprising conclusions--in response to rising public concerns about inequality in the U.S. tax system.

Top economists provide much-needed guidance--and some surprising conclusions--in response to rising public concerns about inequality in the U.S. tax system.

To follow the debate over tax reform, the interested citizen is forced to choose between misleading sound bites and academic treatises. Taxing Ourselves bridges the gap between the two by presenting in clear nontechnical language the key issues in tax reform: who should pay taxes, how taxes...

Provides a historical analysis of many aspects of this tax over the postwar era: revenues collected, the size of the tax base and the role of the exclusions, deductions, exemptions and credits in defining that base, tax exempt levels of income, and the overall progressivity of the rate structure.

We estimate the elasticity of charitable giving with respect to persistent and transitory price and income changes using a 1979–2006 panel of tax returns. Our estimation procedure allows for anticipation of and gradual adjustment to tax changes, controls for various potential sources of...

This paper explores the links between two phenomena of the past two decades: striking increase in the inequality of pre-tax incomes, and the failure of tax-and-transfer progressivity to increase. We emphasize the causal links going from inequality to progressivity, noting that optimal taxation...

One recurring issue in the debate over the estate tax is its impact on the non-profit sector. With the top marginal rate of federal estate tax currently at 49 percent, abolishing the tax would approximately double the price of a charitable bequest relative to an ordinary bequest for the...

We estimate the elasticity of charitable giving with respect to its price and after-tax income using a panel of over 550,000 disproportionately high-income tax returns spanning the years 1979 through 2005. Improvements relative to the previous literature include: using state tax variation to...

This paper examines how changes in state tax policy affect the number of federal estate tax returns filed in each state, utilizing data on federal estate tax return filings by state and wealth class for 18 years between 1965 and 1998. Controlling for state- and wealth-class specific fixed...