The philanthropic sector is highly consequential, particularly in the United States, and the most important policies directed toward this sector are tax policies. Yet most economic analysis of the optimal tax treatment of charitable giving is ad hoc, treating it as a subject unto itself. This...

Although it is generally blind with respect to race, the federal individual income tax can create racial disparities when factors that affect tax liability are associated with race. We provide new evidence on racial differences in marriage penalties and bonuses in the income tax, using data from...

Securities transactions in the U.S. climbed on a net basis from $19 billion in 1983 to $50 billion in 1985. This rise was due almost entirely to an increase in foreign purchases of U.S. securities - largely corporate and government bonds. One reason suggested for this phenomenon is foreign...

This paper uses evidence from a survey of Minnesota taxpayers to estimate the magnitude and demographic patterns of the compliance cost of filing federal and state income tax returns. It concludes that in 1982 this cost was between $17 and $27 billion, or from five to seven percent of the...

This paper carefully outlines a method for the calculation of average marginal tax rates. The method is applied to Statistics of Income data for dividend and interest income earned by U.S. households from 1954 to 1980. To illustrate the effects these data can have inempirical work, the tax rates...

This paper examines the welfare consequences of changing the current U.S. income tax system to a progressive consumption tax. We compute a sequence of single period equilibria in which savings decisions depend on the expected future return to capital. In the presence of existing income taxes,...

We document the time-series of employment rates and hours worked per employed by married couples in the US and seven European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the UK) from the early 1980s through 2016. Relying on a model of joint household labor supply...

Governments and non-profits devote substantial resources to increasing take-up of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) through educational outreach. We study a different approach: policies that encourage tax filing. In a large field experiment, we find that IRS letters about free tax preparation...

We provide estimates of the impact and long-run elasticities of tax base with respect to tax rates for four large U.S. cities: Houston (property taxation), Minneapolis (property taxation), New York City (property, general sales, and income taxation), and Philadelphia (property, gross receipts,...

"Pass-through" businesses like partnerships and S-corporations now generate over half of U.S. business income and account for much of the post-1980 rise in the top- 1% income share. We use administrative tax data from 2011 to identify pass-through business owners and estimate how much tax they...