lations disproportionately have environmental risks while the wealthy and better educated gain disproportionately from protecting unique ecosystems. We test this hypothesis in an analysis of the decline of southern Appalachian spruce-$r forests. We calculate willingness-to-pay measures for forest protection through a contingent valuation survey. Survey respondents consider spruce-fir forest pro...

In this paper, we employ a unique new data set (the Philanthropy Panel Study (PPS), a module within the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID)) to test whether the propensity to donate out of inherited wealth is equal to the propensities to donate out of other wealth, earned income, and transfer payments. We find that the elasticity of giving from non-inherited wealth is much greater than from i...

This paper measures the responsiveness of taxable income to changes in the marginal tax rate using panel data on executive compensation since 1992. It exploits variation from four tax acts: the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, the Jobs and Growth Reconciliation Act of 2003, and the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012. Sto...

This paper introduces …scal increasing returns, through endogenous labor income tax rates as in Schmitt-Grohe and Uribe (1997), into the overlapping generations model with endogenous labor, consumption in both periods of life and homothetic preferences (e.g., Lloyd-Braga, Nourry and Venditti, 2007). We show that under numerical calibrations of the parameters, local indeterminacy can occur for d...

In this paper we propose the use of an alternative methodology to track low incomes based on Atkinson’s (1970) family of “equally distributed equivalent income” functions, which are called “general means” here. Our method of evaluating the effects of growth on poor incomes is based on a comparison of growth rates for two standards of living: the ordinary mean; and a bottom sensitive general mea...

More than 19 percent of people in American central cities are poor. In suburbs, just 7.5 percent of people live in poverty. The income elasticity of demand for land is too low for urban poverty to come from wealthy individuals’ wanting to live where land is cheap (the traditional explanation of urban poverty). A significant income elasticity for land exists only because the rich eschew apartmen...

We estimate the elasticity of corporate taxable income with respect to the effective corporate tax rate on the basis of a pseudo-panel constructed from corporate tax return micro data for the period 1998-2001, a period which saw the introduction of a major corporate tax reform in Germany. Endogeneity of the effective tax rate is controlled for by an instrumental variable approach. Our instrumen...