This paper finds the state lottery tax to be vertically inequitable. The tax is inherently regressive, meaning poorer income classes spend a larger share of their income on lottery products than higher income classes. The paper also finds the lottery tax to be horizontally inequitable. Older people, males, less educated individuals, and minorities (except Asians) all tend to spend more on lotte...

Traditional models of capital budgeting including taxes are based on deterministic tax rates and tax bases. In reality, however, there are multiple sources of tax uncertainty. Tax reforms induce frequent changes in both tax rates and tax bases, making future taxation of investments a stochastic process. Fiscal authorities and tax courts create additional tax uncertainty by interpreting current ...

Taxes make up the bulk of any government revenue and provide a sustainable source of revenue. In recent years, the main focus of the tax reform program, in almost all countries of the world, has been on VAT. But a major problem in the effective implementation of VAT, which is a nascent tax base in countries, is the phenomenon of tax evasion. Therefore, one of the most basic steps in preventing ...

In a recent working paper, Plesko (1999) uses confidential tax return data to evaluate alternative measures of corporate average and marginal tax rates and concludes “The results suggest that commonly used measures of average tax rates provide little insight about annual corporate tax burdens, and may introduce substantial bias into statistical models. Marginal tax rate proxies perform better, ...

This paper studies the effects of effluent taxes on firms’ allocation of resources to cost-reducing and emission-reducing R&D, and on entrepreneurs’ decisions to develop new goods and enter the market. A tax set at an exogenous rate that does not depend on the state of technology reduces growth, the level of consumption of each good, and raises the number of firms. The induced increase in the v...

This paper uses data on actual returns on taxable bonds, tax-exempt bonds, and a small sample of equity mutual funds over the 1962-1998 period to compare two asset location strategies for retirement savers who invest in equities through equity mutual funds. The first strategy, ‘defer stocks first,’ gives priority to holding equity mutual funds in a saver’s tax-deferred account, while the second...