The Trick is to Live: Is the Estate Tax Social Security for the Rich? (2008)
Wojciech Kopczuk, Joel Slemrod, Varsha Venkatesh
Because estate tax liability usually depends on how long one lives, it implicitly provides annuity income. In the absence of annuity markets, lump-sum estate taxation may be used to achieve the...
Chapter 8 Tax Impacts on Wealth Accumulation and Transfers of the Rich (2008)
Wojciech Kopczuk, Joel Slemrod
After many years off the political radar screen, the U.S. estate and gift tax system has recently received a lot of attention, culminating in the scheduled repeal of the tax in 2010 contained in the...
Market Efficiency, the Pareto Wealth Distribution, and the Lévy Distribution of Stock Returns (2007)
Moshe Levy, Michael Brennan, Haim Levy, Victor Ríos-rull, Richard Roll, Eduardo Schwartz, ...
The Pareto (power-law) wealth distribution, which is empirically observed in many countries, implies rather extreme wealth inequality. For instance, in the U.S. the top 1 % of the population holds...
Jonathan Isham, Daniel Kaufmann, Angus Deaton, Paul Duane, Eduardo Engel, Stanley Fischer, ...
Using economic rates of return from World Bank-funded investments, we investigate how country characteristics and policies that influence aggregate performance affect investment productivity....
Comments and Discussion (2007)
Poterba, James M., Slemrod, Joel.
Brookings Papers on Economic Activity - 2007, 1
What’s the Monetary Value of Distributive Justice? (2007)
Giacomo Corneo, Christina M. Fong, Michele Bernasconi, Sam Bowles, Andrew Clark, Claudio Lucifora, ...
Abstract. This paper proposes a model that can be implemented to estimate the willingness to pay for distributive justice, defined as distribu-tion according to desert. We derive a formula that...
PUTTING FIRMS INTO OPTIMAL TAX THEORY (2006)
Wojciech Kopczuk, Joel Slemrod, Wojciech Kopczuk, Joel Slemrod
Firms are, for the most part, absent from the modern theory of optimal taxation. Their disappearance dates from the foundational models developed by Peter A. Diamond and James A. Mirrlees (1971) in...
Investment Taxes and Equity Returns (2006)
Clemens Sialm, Long Chen, Dhammika Dharmapala, Bob Dittmar, Ken French, ...
This paper investigates whether investors are compensated for the tax burden of equity securities. Effective tax rates on equity securities vary due to frequent tax reforms and due to persistent...
Denial of Death and Economic Behavior (2005)
Kopczuk, Wojciech, Slemrod, Joel
We model denial of death and its effect on economic behavior. Attempts to reduce death anxiety and the possibility of denial of mortality-relevant information interact with intertemporal choices and...
Denial of Death and Economic Behavior (2005)
Kopczuk, Wojciech, Slemrod, Joel
We model denial of death and its effect on economic behavior. Attempts to reduce death anxiety and the possibility of denial of mortality-relevant information interact with intertemporal choices and...
Denial of Death and Economic Behavior (2005)
Kopczuk, Wojciech, Slemrod, Joel
We model denial of death and its effect on economic behavior. Attempts to reduce death anxiety and the possibility of denial of mortality-relevant information interact with intertemporal choices and...
Denial of Death and Economic Behavior (2005)
Kopczuk, Wojciech, Slemrod, Joel
We model denial of death and its effect on economic behavior. Attempts to reduce death anxiety and the possibility of denial of mortality-relevant information interact with intertemporal choices and...
London, on September 26. I am grateful to Katherine Blauvelt for research assistance and extended conversations that clarified my thinking on a number of issues. 1 Thank you for the invitation. It is...
Top Wealth Shares in the United States, 19162000: Evidence from Estate Tax Returns (2004)
Wojciech Kopczuk, David Joulfaian, Arthur Kennickell, Thomas Piketty, Karl Scholz, James Poterba, ...
We are extremely grateful to Barry Johnson for facilitating our use of the micro estate tax returns data and for his enormous help and patience explaining it. We thank Ed Wolff for providing us with...
The Income Tax Compliance Cost of Large and Mid-Size Businesses (2002)
This reports presents evidence on the compliance costs of medium-sized businesses based on a survey conducted by the Office of Tax Policy Research. The survey attempts to measure the size and...
DO WE NOW COLLECT ANY REVENUE FROM TAXING CAPITAL INCOME? (2002)
Roger Gordon, Laura Kalambokidis, Joel Slemrod, Roger Gordon, Laura Kalambokidis, Joel Slemrod
Heidi Shierholz and Steffanie Guess-Murphy for outstanding research assistance. Abstract: The U.S. income tax system has long been recognized as a hybrid of an income and consumption tax, with...
including © notice, is given to the source. Why World Redistribution Fails (2002)
Wojciech Kopczuk, Joel Slemrod, Shlomo Yitzhaki, Wojciech Kopczuk, Joel Slemrod, Shlomo Yitzhaki, ...
An optimal linear world income tax that maximizes a border-neutral social welfare function provides a drastic reduction in world consumption inequality, dropping the Gini coefficient from 0.69 to...
to the source. Do Trust and Trustworthiness Pay Off? (2002)
Joel Slemrod, Peter Katuscak, Joel Slemrod, Peter Katuscak, Jel No. J, Joel Slemrod, ...
We would like to thank members of the University of Michigan Public Finance workshop, and particularly John Bound and Matthew Shapiro, for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. The...
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES TRUST IN PUBLIC FINANCE (2002)
Joel Slemrod, Joel Slemrod, Jel No. H
This paper was presented at the conference Public Finances and Public Policy in the New Millennium, a
The Trick is to Live: Is the Estate Tax Social Security for the (2002)
Wojciech Kopczuk, Joel Slemrod, Jim Hines, John Laitner, Varsha Venkatesh, ...
JEL No. H2 Because estate tax liability usually depends on how long one lives, it implicitly provides annuity income. In the absence of annuity markets, lump-sum estate taxation may be used to...
Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate Tax Returns on the Death Elasticity (2001)
Wojciech Kopczuk, Joel Slemrod, Robert Greebel, Cassie Stone Provided, David Joulfaian, Janet Mccubbin
allowing access to confidential estate tax return data under a data disclosure agreement. We especially thank Barry Johnson of SOI for patiently explaining the data structure and
Tax Avoidance, Evasion, and Administration (2000)
Brian Erard, Firouz Gahvari, Roger Gordon, Jim Hines, Jonathan Kesselman, Louis Kaplow, ...
Forthcoming in the Handbook of Public Economics, edited by Alan Auerbach and Martin
Tax avoidance activities of U.S. multinational corporations / (1999)
Olhoft, Sonja Lynne., Slemrod, Joel., Sloan, Richard G.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Michigan, 1999.
SLEMROD, JOEL, CHRISTIAN, CHARLES, LONDON, REBECCA, PARKER, JONATHAN A.
In tax year 1988, delaying filing income tax returns cost the 73.2 million taxpayers claiming refunds nearly one billion dollars of interest. “Impatient” tax filers, who mail in their tax...
Do Taxes Matter for Foreign Direct Investment? (1991)
The tax sensitivity of foreign direct investment (FDI) has important policy implications. If FDI is not responsive to taxation, then it may be an appropriate target for taxation by the host country....
Burilovich, Linda Skantz., Danos, Paul., Slemrod, Joel.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Michigan, 1990.
FEAR OF NUCLEAR WAR AND INTERCOUNTRY DIFFERENCES IN THE RATE OF SAVING (1990)
This paper demonstrates that, across nineteen OECD countries for 1981–84, a survey-based measure of the perceived likelihood of nuclear war is negatively correlated with the rate of net private...
Hayashi, Fumio, Ito, Takatoshi, Slemrod, Joel
This paper presents a life-cycle simulation analysis of the interaction among savings decisions, housing purchase decisions, and the tax system in the United States and Japan. To investigate this...
Hayashi, Fumio, Ito, Takatoshi, Slemrod, Joel
This paper presents a life-cycle simulation analysis of the interaction among savings decisions, housing purchase decisions, and the tax system in the United States and Japan. To investigate this...
A general equilibrium model of capital income taxation [microform] / (1980)
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1980.
Denial of Death and Economic Behavior
Wojciech Kopczuk, Joel Slemrod
We model denial of death and its effect on economic behavior. Attempts to reduce death anxiety and the possibility of denial of mortality-relevant information interact with intertemporal choices and...
Denial of Death and Economic Behavior
Wojciech Kopczuk, Joel Slemrod
We model denial of death and its effect on economic behavior. Attempts to reduce death anxiety and the possibility of denial of mortality-relevant information interact with intertemporal choices and...
Welfare Dominance: An Application to Commodity Taxation.
Yitzhaki, Shlomo, Slemrod, Joel
In this paper, the authors propose a method to identify commodity-tax changes that will be favored by all individuals who can agree on certain weak assumptions with regard to the social-welfare...
Douglas Shackelford, Joel Slemrod
This paper examines the 1989–1993 publicly available financial reports of 46 U.S.-based multinationals to estimate the revenue implications of implementing a U.S. federal formula apportionment...
The Economics of Corporate Tax Selfishness
This paper offers an economics perspective on corporate tax noncompliance. It first reviews what is known about the extent and nature of corporate tax noncompliance and the resources devoted to...
Behavioral Public Finance: Tax Design As Price Presentation.
Krishna, Aradhna, Slemrod, Joel
In this essay we review the evidence from marketing research about price presentation of consumer products and discuss how these lessons have been applied--consciously or unconsciously--in the design...
Tax sensitivity of foreign direct investment : an empirical assessment
Tax sensitivity of foreign direct investment (FDI) has important policy implications. If FDI is not responsive to taxation, then it may be an appropriate target for taxation by the host country,...
Taxation and Big Brother: information, personalisation and privacy in 21st century tax policy
I view part of my responsibility as to report on fiscal developments in the United States. Any report from the States would have to note that the past several weeks have been tumultuous, what with...
The Economics of Earnings Manipulation and Managerial Compensation
Keith J. Crocker, Joel Slemrod
This paper examines managerial compensation in an environment where managers may take a hidden action that affects the actual earnings of the firm. When realized, these earnings constitute hidden...
Tax Law Changes, Income Shifting and Measured Wage Inequality: Evidence from India
Jagadeesh Sivadasan, Joel Slemrod
We use a large dataset covering all registered plants in the manufacturing sector in India over the period 1986 to 1995 to examine the effects of a 1992 income tax law change that eliminated the...
Douglas A. Shackelford, Joel Slemrod, James M. Sallee
This paper models the impact of the tax system and GAAP on the real and financial reporting decisions of corporations. It provides a first step toward joint evaluation of taxation and financial...
The Lock-In Effect of the Capital Gains Tax: Some Time Series Evidence
Joel Slemrod, Martin Feldstein
This study presents time-series evidence indicating that capital gains taxation reduces the realization of capital gains. The "lock-in" effect is detectable once we divide individuals into categories...
Inflation and the Excess Taxation of Capital Gains on Corporate Stock
Martin Feldstein, Joel Slemrod
The present study shows that in 1973 individuals paid nearly $500 million of extra tax on corporate stock capital gains because of the distorting effect of inflation. A detailed analysis shows that...
Personal Taxation, Portfolio Choice and The Effect of the Corporation Income Tax
Martin Feldstein, Joel Slemrod
Extending the traditional treatment of the corporate tax to an economy with a progressive personal tax fundamentally changes the analysis. While the corporate tax system (CTS) does increase the total...
The Effects of Taxation on the Selling of Corporate Stock and the Realization of Capital Gains
Martin Feldstein, Joel Slemrod, Shlomo Yitzhaki
This study provides the first econometric analysis of the effect of taxation on the realization of capital gains. The analysis thus extends and complements the earlier study by Feldstein and Yitzhaki...
A General Equilibrium Simulation Study of Subsidies to Municipal Expenditures
In the United States, local government expenditures are heavily subsidized through a variety of sources. This paper explores theoretically and then simulates empirically the effects of eliminating...
A General Equilibrium Model of Taxation with Endogenous Financial Behavior
This paper presents and utilizes a new general equilibrium simulation model of capital income taxation. Its chief advantage over existing models of the effects of taxation is that it recognizes that...
This paper develops a methodology in integrating the information from a micro-unit data file of tax returns into the framework of a general equilibrium model of taxation with endogenous financial...
An Empirical Examination of Municipal Financial Policy
Current U.S. tax law creates a variety of incentives affecting municipal financial policy. Under current law,municipalities can borrow at a tax-exempt interest rate yet can earn the full market rate...
Welfare Dominance: An Application to Commodity Taxation
In this paper, we suggest a method which enables the user to identify commodities that all individuals who can agree on certain weak assumptions with regard to the social welfare function will agree...
The Return to Tax Simplification: An Econometric Analysis
The purpose of this paper is to provide estimates of the probable saving in the resource cost of complying with the tax law that would result from simplifying the individual income tax law. These...
The Optimal Size of a Tax Collection Agency
This paper addresses the optimal degree of law enforcement regarding tax evasion. It derives the conditions that characterize the optimal size of a tax collection agency, and then provides a simple...
The Impact of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 on Foreign Direct Investment to and from the United States
Since the passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, foreign direct investment (FDI) both into and from the United States has surged. Inward FDI reached an all-time high of $58.4 billion in 1988,...
The Tax Elasticity of Capital Gains Realizations: Evidence from a Panel of Taxpayers
This paper examines a newly available six-year panel of tax return data to see what light it sheds on the tax elasticity of capital gains realizations. Panel data are a particularly valuable source...
A North-South Model of Taxation and Capital Flow
This paper presents a simple two-country model of the role of taxation in capital flows between developed countries ("The North") and developing countries ("The South"). The Southern country is...
Do Taxes Matter? Lessons From the 1980s
The response of the economy to two major -- although in important respects offsetting -- tax reforms has been much smaller than ardent supply-side revolutionaries expected, thus suggesting that a...
At the end of 1983 Gallup polls showed that 52 percent of Americans thought that the probability of a world war in the next 10 years was 50% or higher; by 1989 the percentage had dropped to 29%. Fear...
Estimating tax noncompliance with evidence from unaudited tax returns
Naomi E. Feldman, Joel Slemrod
This article estimates the degree of tax noncompliance using evidence from unaudited tax returns. Measurements of noncompliance are derived from the relationship between reported charitable...
The Impact of Tax Reform on Households
This paper analyzes the Reagan Administratioris tax reform proposal in terms of its three stated objectives --fairness, simplicity, and economic growth -- and considers its likely effecton labor...
Tax return data, which has been a principal source for econometric investigations of the behavioral response to tax policy, is subject to misreporting that may bias estimates of tax responsiveness....
Fumio Hayashi, Takatoshi Ito, Joel Slemrod
This paper presents a life-cycle simulation analysis of the interaction among savings decisions, housing purchase decisions, and the tax system in the United States and Japan. To investigate this...
Involvement, Prosperity, and Economic Growth?
macroeconomics, Involvement, Prosperity, Economic Growth
The optimal two-bracket linear income tax
Slemrod, Joel, Yitzhaki, Shlomo, Mayshar, Joram, Lundholm, Michael
The Optimal Size of a Tax Collection Agency.
Slemrod, Joel, Yitzhaki, Shlomo
The condition that characterizes the optimal size of a tax-collection agency is der ived and then given a simple interpretation in terms of excess burden This paper clarifies an earlier finding of A....
Cheating Ourselves: The Economics of Tax Evasion
No government can announce a tax system and then rely on taxpayers’ sense of duty to remit what is owed. Some dutiful people will undoubtedly pay what they owe, but many others will not. Over time...
Involvement, Prosperity, and Economic Growth?
macroeconomics, Involvement, Prosperity, Economic Growth
Tax avoidance, evasion, and administration
Slemrod, Joel, Yitzhaki, Shlomo, A. J. Auerbach, M. Feldstein
Tax avoidance and evasion are pervasive in all countries, and tax structures are undoubtedly skewed by this reality. Standard models of taxation and their conclusions must reflect these...
The Economic Effects of the Tax Reform Act of 1986
Alan J. Auerbach, Joel Slemrod
The Tax Reform Act of 1986 constituted the most sweeping postwar change in the U.S. federal income tax. This paper considers what the Act accomplished and its implications for future tax policy....
The Economics of Workaholism: We Should Not Have Worked on This Paper
Daniel S. Hamermesh, Joel Slemrod
A large literature examines the addictive properties of such behaviors as smoking, drinking alcohol and eating. We argue that for some people addictive behavior may apply to a much more central...
Trust and Trustworthiness in an Economy with Heterogeneous Individuals
We analyze the determinants of trust and trustworthiness in a matching equilibrium when agents have heterogeneous predispositions towards trusting and trustworthy behavior, there is transmission of...
A General Model of the Behavioral Response to Taxation
This paper generalizes the standard model of how taxes affect the labor-leisure choice by allowing individuals to change both their labor supply and avoidance effort in response to tax changes. Doing...
Behavioral Public Finance: Tax Design as Price Presentation
In this essay we review the evidence from marketing research about price presentation of consumer products and discuss how these lessons have been applied—consciously or unconsciously—in the...
The Effect Of Taxes On Investment And Income Shifting To Puerto Rico
The income of Puerto Rican affiliates of U.S. corporations is essentially untaxed by either Puerto Rico or the United States. This lowers the tax penalty on investment there, and also makes it...
This paper uses data from tax returns that have been subject to intensive audits to confront the quantitative importance of misreporting for the estimated tax responsiveness of charitable...
Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate-Tax Returns on the Death Elasticity
Wojciech Kopczuk, Joel Slemrod
This paper examines data from U.S. federal tax returns to shed light on whether the timing of death is responsive to its tax consequences. We investigate the temporal pattern of deaths around the...
Do Taxes Matter for Foreign Direct Investment?
The tax sensitivity of foreign direct investment (FDI) has important policy implications. If FDI is not responsive to taxation, then it may be an appropriate target for taxation by the host country....
The Costs of Taxation and the Marginal Cost of Funds
Taxation , Tax systems , Tax administration , Tax evasion ,
The Economics of Workaholism: We Should Not Have Worked on This Paper
Daniel Hamermesh, Joel Slemrod
A large literature examines the addictive properties of such behaviors as smoking, drinking alcohol, gambling and eating. We argue that for some people addictive behavior may apply to a much more...
Fear of Nuclear War and Intercountry Differences in the Rate of Saving.
This paper demonstrates that, across nineteen OECD countries for 1981-84, a survey-based measure of the perceived likelihood of nuclear war is negatively correlated with the rate of net private...
Post-War Capital Accumulation and the Threat of Nuclear War
The hypothesis of this paper is that the performance and, in particular, the rate of capital accumulation of the post-war U.S. economy has been influenced by the changes in the public perception of...
Tax Effects on the Allocation of Capital Among Sectors and Among Individuals: A Portfolio Approach
This paper deals with the allocational effects and implications for efficiency of a tax system in which the rate of tax on capital income differs depending on the recipient of the income and on the...
On Choosing a Flat-Rate Income Tax Schedule
This paper applies a numerical optimization technique using microunit tax data to the problem of choosing the parameters of a flat-rate tax system, should one be desired. Our approach is to first...
Taxes and the User Cost of Capital for Owner-Occupied Housing
Patric H. Hendershott, Joel Slemrod
Owner-occupied housing is said to be favored in the tax code because mortgage interest and property taxes can be deducted in the computation of one's income tax base in spite of the fact that the...
The Compliance Cost of the U.S. Individual Income Tax System
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...
Suzanne Scotchmer, Joel Slemrod
For most parameter values, increased randomness about how much taxable income an auditor would assess leads to higher reported income and more revenue, When reducing randomness is costly, optimality...
Fear of Nuclear War and Intercountry Differences in the Rate of Saving
This paper demonstrates that a survey-based measure of the perceived likelihood of nuclear war in a country is negatively correlated with the country's rate of net private saving, holding other...
Taxes, Tariffs, and The Global Corporation
In this paper we develop some simple models of optimal tax and tariff policy in the presence of global corporations that operate in an imperfectly competitive environment. The models emphasize two...
Optimal Taxation and Optimal Tax Systems
The theory of optimal taxation has , for the pas two decades , been the reigning normative approach of taxation. This paper argues that , in its current state, optimal tax theory is incomplete as a...
This paper investigates how the tax system of the U.S. and the capital- exporting country combine to affect the flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) into the U.S. First, using aggregate data, it...
The Compliance Cost of Itemizing Deductions: Evidence from Individual Tax Returns
The resource cost of operating the income tax system is large, totaling as much as seven to eight percent of revenue raised. One source of this cost is the system of itemized deductions, which can...
The Optimal Two-Bracket Linear Income Tax
Joel Slemrod, Shlomo Yitzhaki, Joram Mayshar
We investigate the optimal rate structure of an income tax system that is constrained to have only two brackets, plus a demogrant. We find that, in a two-class economy, Pareto efficient tax schedules...
Income Shifting in U.S. Multinational Corporations
David Harris, Randall Morck, Joel Slemrod, Bernard Yeung
It is often claimed that multinational firms avoid taxes by shifting income from high-tax to low-tax countries. Using a five year panel of data for two hundred large U.S. manufacturing firms, we find...
Taxation and Inequality: A Time-Exposure Perspective
Conclusions about inequality based on cross-sectional snapshots of annual income can give a misleading picture of the inequality of a more permanent notion of income, due to the mobility of...
The Seesaw Principle in International Tax Policy
Joel Slemrod, Carl Hansen, Roger Procter
The standard analysis of the optimal international tax policy of a small country typically assumes that the country either imports or exports capital, but does not do both. This paper considers the...
The Effect of Taxes on Investment and Income Shifting to Puerto Rico
The income of Puerto Rican affiliates of U.S. corporations is essentially untaxed by either Puerto Rico or the U.S. This lowers the tax penalty on real investment there, and also makes it attractive...
Free-Trade Taxation and Protectionist Taxation
This paper explores the normative theory of international taxation by recasting it in parallel with the theory of international trade. It first sets out a definition of 'free trade taxation,' first...
Consumer Response to the Timing of Income: Evidence from a Change in Tax Withholding
Matthew D. Shapiro, Joel Slemrod
In 1992, the income tax withholding tables were adjusted so that withholding was reduced. A typical worker received an extra $28.80 in take-home pay per month in March through December 1992, to be...
High-Income Families and the Tax Changes of the 1980s: The Anatomy of Behavioral Response
The relative income gains of the affluent after the passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86), which sharply lowered tax rates at high income levels, are overstated by comparing cross-sectional...
The Determinants of Income Tax Compliance: Evidence from a Controlled Experiment in Minnesota
Marsha Blumenthal, Charles Christian, Joel Slemrod
This paper reports on the results of a controlled experiment in Minnesota in which a random sample of taxpayers was informed that their income tax returns would certainly be closely examined. We...
Are "Real" Responses to Taxes Simply Income Shifting Between Corporate and Personal Tax Bases?
Two well-noted phenomena of recent decades are the increasing concentration of personal income and the declining rate of corporate profitability. This paper investigates to what extent these two...
A General Model of the Behavioral Response to Taxation
This paper generalizes the standard model of how taxes affect the labor-leisure choice by allowing individuals to change both their labor supply and avoidance effort in response to tax changes. Doing...
Did Steve Forbes Scare the Municipal Bond Market?
Evidence from daily market data is consistent with the view that the implicit tax rate on 5-year municipal bonds was affected by the chance of a flat tax becoming law, as proxied by the price of...
The Economics of Taxing the Rich
How much and how to tax high-income individuals is at the core of many recent proposals for incremental as well as fundamental tax reform. This paper critically reviews the economics literature and...
Tax Avoidance, Evasion, and Administration
When tax structure changes, people may alter their consumption basket, but they also may call and give new instructions to their accountant, change their reports to the IRS, change the timing of...
Does Growing Inequality Reduce Tax Progressivity? Should It?
This paper explores the links between two phenomena of the past two decades: striking increase in the inequality of pre-tax incomes, and the failure of tax-and-transfer progressivity to increase. We...
The Optimal Elasticity of Taxable Income
Joel Slemrod, Wojciech Kopczuk
The strength of the behavioral response to a tax rate change depends on the environment individuals operate in, and may be manipulated by instruments controlled by the government. We first derive a...
The Impact of the Estate Tax on the Wealth Accumulation and Avoidance Behavior of Donors
Joel Slemrod, Wojciech Kopczuk
Using estate tax return data from 1916 to 1996, we investigate the impact of the estate tax on reported estates, which reflects the impact of the tax on both wealth accumulation and avoidance. An...
Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate Tax Returns on the Death Elasticity
Wojciech Kopczuk, Joel Slemrod
This paper examines data from U.S. federal tax returns to shed light on whether the timing of death is responsive to its tax consequences. We investigate the temporal pattern of deaths around the...
This paper seeks to clarify the extent to which the rule for providing public goods ought to correct for the distortionary cost of raising funds. We argue that, in evaluating public projects, the...
Consumer Response to Tax Rebates
Matthew D. Shapiro, Joel Slemrod
Many households received income tax rebates in 2001 of $300 or $600. These rebates represented advance payments of the tax cut from the new 10 percent tax bracket. Based on a survey of a...
Why World Redistribution Fails
Wojciech Kopczuk, Joel Slemrod, Shlomo Yitzhaki
An optimal linear world income tax that maximizes a border-neutral social welfare function provides a drastic reduction in world consumption inequality, dropping the Gini coefficient from 0.69 to...
Using data on trust and trustworthiness from the 1990 wave of the World Values Survey, I first investigate a model of the extent of tax cheating and the size of government that recognizes the...
Do Trust and Trustworthiness Pay Off?
Are individuals who trust others better off than those who do not? Do trustworthy people prosper more than untrustworthy ones? We first pose these questions in a search model where individuals face...
Did the 2001 Tax Rebate Stimulate Spending? Evidence from Taxpayer Surveys
Matthew D. Shapiro, Joel Slemrod
In 2001, many households received rebate checks as advanced payments of the benefit of the new, 10 percent federal income tax bracket. A survey conducted at the time the rebates were mailed finds...
Do We Now Collect Any Revenue From Taxing Capital Income?
Roger H. Gordon, Laura Kalambokidis, Joel Slemrod
The U.S. income tax has long been recognized as a hybrid of an income and consumption tax, with elements that do not fit naturally into either pure system. The precise nature of this hybrid has...
A New Summary Measure of the Effective Tax Rate on Investment
Roger Gordon, Laura Kalambokidis, Joel Slemrod
The empirical literature that seeks to measure the effective tax rate on new investment offers a striking paradox. On the one hand, summary measures of the effective tax rate on new investment are...
Jon Bakija, William Gale, Joel Slemrod
One recurring issue in the debate over the estate tax is its impact on the non-profit sector. With the top marginal rate of federal estate tax currently at 49 percent, abolishing the tax would...
Do the Rich Flee from High State Taxes? Evidence from Federal Estate Tax Returns
This paper examines how changes in state tax policy affect the number of federal estate tax returns filed in each state, utilizing data on federal estate tax return filings by state and wealth class...
Corporate Tax Evasion with Agency Costs
Keith J. Crocker, Joel Slemrod
This paper examines corporate tax evasion in the context of the contractual relationship between the shareholders of a firm and a tax manager who possesses private information regarding the extent of...
The Economics of Workaholism: We Should Not Have Worked on This Paper
Daniel S. Hamermesh, Joel Slemrod
A large literature examines the addictive properties of such behaviors as smoking, drinking alcohol and eating. We argue that for some people addictive behavior may apply to a much more central...
Tax Competition With Parasitic Tax Havens
We develop a tax competition framework in which some jurisdictions, called tax havens, are parasitic on the revenues of other countries. The havens use real resources to help companies camouflage...
Taxes and the User Cost of Capital for Owner-Occupied Housing
Patric H. Hendershott, Joel Slemrod
Owner-occupied housing is said to be favored in the tax code because the return on owner's equity is not taxed and mortgage interest and property taxes can be deducted in the computation of one's...
Taxing Ourselves, 4th Edition: A Citizen's Guide to the Debate over Taxes
As Albert Einstein may or may not have said, "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax." Indeed, to follow the debate over tax reform, the interested citizen is forced to choose...
Hanlon, Michelle, Slemrod, Joel
We study the stock price reaction to news about corporate tax aggressiveness. We find that, on average, a company's stock price declines when there is news about its involvement in tax shelters. We...
Tax law changes, income-shifting and measured wage inequality: Evidence from India
Sivadasan, Jagadeesh, Slemrod, Joel
We examine the effects of a 1992 income tax law change in India that eliminated the tax penalty on wages paid to partners in partnership firms using a large dataset covering all registered plants in...
Marsha Blumenthal, Joel Slemrod
taxation, compliance costs, multinational corporations,
Analyzing the standard deduction as a presumptive tax
taxation, horizontal equity, compliance costs,
Taxing Ourselves, 3rd Edition: A Citizen's Guide to the Debate over Taxes
To follow the debate over tax reform, the interested citizen is forced to choose between misleading sound bites and academic treatises. Taxing Ourselves bridges the gap between the two by presenting...
Fiscal Reform in Colombia: Problems and Prospects
Richard M. Bird, James M. Poterba, Joel Slemrod
Colombia, once a model of fiscal discipline for other Latin American nations, has seen its fiscal situation deteriorate since the early 1990s. Higher government spending, taxes that did not keep pace...
On the Sensitivity of R&D to Delicate Tax Changes: The Behavior of U. S. Multinationals in the 1980s
Do Trust and Trustworthiness Pay Off?
Are individuals who trust others better off than those who do not? Do trustworthy people prosper more than untrustworthy ones? We formulate and, using data from the World Values Survey, empirically...
Taxing Corporate Income in the 21st Century
Auerbach,Alan J., Slemrod,Joel
Most countries levy taxes on corporations, but the impact - and therefore the wisdom - of such taxes is highly controversial among economists. Does the burden of these taxes fall on wealthy...
Old George Orwell Got it Backward: Some Thoughts on Behavioral Tax Economics
It is entirely appropriate that the study of public finance take seriously “behavioral” inconsistencies with traditional models of individual and collective decision-making. This raises the...