This paper examines the economic impact of the apportionment formulae used to divide corporate income taxes among the states. Since such formulae usually include total payroll, they transform, at least partially, the state corporate income tax into a direct factor tax on payroll. Using panel...

This paper tests for and measures monopsony power in the U.S. higher education labor market. It does so by directly estimating the residual labor supply curves facing individual four-year colleges and universities using school-specific labor demand instruments. The results indicate that schools...

We use Adobe Analytics data on online transactions for millions of products in many different categories from 2014 to 2017 to shed light on how online inflation compares to overall inflation, and to gauge the magnitude of new product bias online. The Adobe data contain transaction prices and...

By double taxing the income of corporate firms but not unincorporated firms, taxes can play an important role in a firm's choice of organizational form. The sensitivity of the organizational form decision to tax rates can also be used to approximate the efficiency cost of the corporate income...

Although tax arbitrage is central to the literatures on tax capitalization, implicit taxes, and even capital structure, there is little empirical evidence of the extent to which firms actually engage in tax arbitrage. This paper provides some evidence on the topic by focusing on a simple and...

Conventional wisdom holds that the social rate of return to R&D significantly exceeds the private rate of return and, therefore, R&D should be subsidized. In the U.S., the government has directly funded a large fraction of total R&D spending. This paper shows that there is a serious problem with...

Despite the interest in measuring price sensitivity of online consumers, most academic work on Internet commerce is hindered by a lack of data on quantity. In this paper we use publicly available data on the sales ranks of about 20,000 books to derive quantity proxies at the two leading online...

This paper reexamines the responsiveness of taxable income to changes in in marginal tax rates using detailed compensation data on several thousand corporate executives from 1991 to 1995. The data confirm that the higher marginal rates of 1993 led to a significant decline in taxable income. This...

In this paper we examine the importance of local spillovers such as network externalities and learning from others in the diffusion of home computers using data on 110,000 U.S. households in 1997. Controlling for many individual characteristics, we find that people are more likely to buy their...

An influential literature on the effects of marginal tax rates on the behavior of the rich has claimed that the elasticity of taxable income with respect to the net of tax share is very high possibly exceeding one. These high estimated elasticities imply that cutting taxes on the rich does not...