This paper measures the probability of rare disasters by measuring the probability of the intermeeting federal funds rate cuts they provoke. Differentiating between months with Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings and months without identifies excess returns on federal funds futures...

Democrats and Republicans agree that the U.S. international tax system needs fixing, and the U.S. corporate tax rate is too high. Americans across the ideological spectrum see income inequality as a big problem.Reducing income inequality can allow a reduction in the corporate tax rate and help...

This article proposes a progressive system of mark-to-market taxation.Under the proposal, all public companies, all private companies with $50 million or more of net assets, and all individuals and married couples with $1.6 million of adjusted gross income or $5 million of publicly traded...

While the surge in 501(c)(4)s that led to the current IRS scandal is widely attributable to Citizens United, it was a very deliberate IRS action – the decision to exempt donations to 501(c)(4)s from gift tax – that was equally responsible for the unprecedented spending by 501(c)(4)s in the...

On January 24, 2013, Congressman Dave Camp (R-MI), the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, released the discussion draft of a bill that would tax derivatives under a mark-to-market system of taxation. This truly Copernican proposal would replace our entire federal system of taxing...

On September 17, 2015, the IRS and the Treasury Department issued final, temporary, and proposed regulations under section 871(m) of the Internal Revenue Code that provide the rules for withholding on “dividend equivalent payments” on derivatives that reference U.S. equity securities. In...

This paper posits an information channel as the explanation for sudden inflations. Consumers saving via nominal government bonds face a choice whether to acquire costly information about future government surpluses. They trade off the cost of acquiring information about the surpluses that back...