Calculating the welfare implications of changes to economic policy or shocks requires economists to decide on a normative criterion. One approach is to elicit the relevant moral criteria from real-world policy choices, converting a normative decision into a positive inference, as in the recent...

Has the VAT proved, as its proponents claim, an especially effective form of taxation? To address this, this paper first shows that a tax innovation-such as the introduction of a VAT- reduces the marginal cost of public funds if and only if it also leads an optimizing government to increase the...

Taxation affects the allocation of talented individuals across professions by blunting material incentives and thus magnifying non-pecuniary incentives of pursuing a “calling.” Estimates from the literature suggest high-paying professions have negative externalities, whereas low-paying...

Calculating the welfare implications of changes to economic policy or shocks requires economists to decide on a normative criterion. One approach is to elicit the relevant moral criteria from real-world policy choices, converting a normative decision into a positive inference, as in the recent...

Has the VAT proved, as its proponents claim, an especially effective form of taxation? To address this, this paper first shows that a tax innovation-such as the introduction of a VAT- reduces the marginal cost of public funds if and only if it also leads an optimizing government to increase the...

This paper estimates the effects of tax incentives on charitable contributions in the UK, using the universe of self-assessment income tax returns between 2005 and 2013. We exploit variation from a large reform in 2010 to estimate intensive and extensive-margin tax-price elasticities of giving....

This paper estimates the intensive and extensive-margin tax-price elasticities of giving using UK administrative tax return data, exploiting variation from a large tax reform. Using a variety of estimation methods and new instruments for the tax-price of giving, we find an intensive-margin...

This paper estimates the intensive and extensive-margin tax-price elasticities of giving using UK administrative tax return data, exploiting variation from a large tax reform. Using a variety of estimation methods and new instruments for the tax-price of giving, we find an intensive-margin...