The complexity of the individual income tax system can give rise to both under and overreporting of liability, thus creating a wedge between taxpayer perceptions of the price of public services and their actual cost, and potentially leading to budget misallocations and associated efficiency losses. This study uses theory and experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of taxpayer service programs...

This article provides a brief history of tax and expenditure limitation initiatives in Oregon, along with a narrative of contemporary events. Largely as a consequence of the initiative’s increased role in the formulation of Oregon’s fiscal policy, state and local taxes paid by Oregon households declined from 7.4 percent of income in 1989 to 6.8 percent in 2003; state revenue, which is heavily d...

We construct a general equilibrium trade model of a two-class small open host or source country. When consumption tax revenue finances the provision of a public good, marginal migration reduces social welfare in the source country and raises it in the host. When consumption tax revenue is equally distributed among domestic households in each country, then migration has an ambiguous impact on so...

The paper studies the interaction between public and private inputs in a two-stage education framework (K-12 and tertiary education). We …nd that an increase in the overall educational public spending crowds out the total level of private contributions and increases the share of total private resources that households devote to K-12 education. Given a …xed level of public funding, a higher shar...

Higher welfare support levels diminish the relative value of education according to standard economic theory. However, studies based on the negative income tax experimentshavefound that higher welfare support levels increase participation in the educational system. This study examines a nonexperimental source of data to determine the effect of higher expected state-level welfare benefits on hig...

The paper provides an extension and a new proof of Deaton’s theorem on the undesirability of nonuniform excise taxation when income taxes are a¢ ne and preferences over consumption goods are separable from labour-leisure choices, homothetic, and identical across agents. Key Words: Optimal Excise Taxes, Atkinson-Stiglitz Theorem, Deaton’s Theorem JEL Classi…cation: H21

We document contemporaneous differences in the aggregate labor supply of married couples across 17 European countries and the US. Based on a model of joint household decision making, we quantify the contribution of international differences in non-linear labor income taxes and consumption taxes, as well as the educational composition, and gender wage gaps and educational premia, to the internat...

Taiwan, Republic of China (ROC), introduced a new income tax system, combining corporate and personal income taxes, on 1 January 1976. This new tax system, resembling those used in many European countries, has had a significant impact on the debt/equity capital structure of companies domiciled in Taiwan. This study provides historical background concerning taxing policies, an analysis of the ne...

Do income taxes levied at a state or regional level affect the after-tax distribution of income? Or do workers merely move between regions, causing pre-tax wages to adjust? Using the full income tax parameters for all US states from 1977-2002, I create a “simulated tax redistribution index”, which captures the mechanical impact of changes in tax policy on the Gini coefficient, but is exogenous ...

income taxes is approximately $1.565 million, implying an aggregate annual compliance cost of over $2 billion. As a fraction of revenue raised, these compliance costs are lower than estimates that have been made for the individual income tax. The cost-to-revenue ratio is higher for state corporate tax systems than it is for the federal tax system, presumably reflecting the nonuniformity of stat...