Marginal Tax Rate Cuts and the Public Tax Debate

Do Tax Rate Cuts Encourage Entrepreneurial Entry?

Policy makers have long been interested in whether tax policies can be used to encourage entrepreneurial activity, but prior studies have produced ambiguous results. We use a twelveyear panel of tax return data to examine the effects of tax rates on entrepreneurial entry. We calculate household-level tax rates and employ multiple measures of entrepreneurship. Our results offer convincing eviden...

Self-financing of Tax Cuts

Phased-In Tax Cuts and Economic Activity

This paper uses a dynamic general equilibrium model to analyze and quantify the aggregate effects of the timing of the tax rate changes enacted in 2001 and 2003. The 2001 law called for a sequence of successive rate reductions from 2001 until 2006. The 2003 law made immediate the tax rate cuts scheduled for 2004 and 2006 under the earlier law. The phased-in nature of the tax cuts under the 2001...

Corporate Tax Cuts and Foreign Direct Investment

Accurate policy evaluation is central to optimal policymaking, but difficult to achieve. Most often, analysts have to work with observational data and cannot directly observe the counterfactual of a policy to assess its effect accurately. In this paper, we craft a quasi-experimental design and apply two relatively new methods—the differencein-differences estimation and the synthetic controls me...

The Required Tax Rate in a National Retail Sales Tax

443 National Tax Journal Vol. LII, No. 3 Abstract This paper examines the required tax rate in a national retail sales tax (NRST). I show that recent proposals, such as one to replace virtually all federal revenues with a 23 percent taxinclusive NRST, are based on assumptions that real government spending would decline by $480 billion per year and that there would be no tax avoidance, evasion, ...