Digital Commons Network^™

Migration And The Quality Of American Cities, Chase Mendell

CMC Senior Theses

Across the United States, cities are expanding. It is the role of the city leaders to promote policies that benefit both current and incoming residents. While these policies have intended results, the realized benefits and damages are challenging to define because they are the result of individual choices and the unique characteristics of the city. As a result, policymakers need to consider a complex web of factors such as employment, taxation, housing, mobility, and environmental quality. This thesis seeks to analyze these overlapping factors to discuss how policymakers can increase well-being while mitigating potential harms.

The State's Response To The Crisis Of Neoliberalism: A Comparison Of The Net Social Wage In China And The United States, 1992-2017, Katherine A. Moos, Hao Qi

PERI Working Papers

We compare the welfare states and taxation regimes of the two largest economies in the world, China and the United States, from 1992 to 2017. We begin with a comparison of each country’s net social wage—that is, the difference between total benefits received by and taxes paid by labor—using two established methods. While the net social wage in the two countries exhibited similar trends, the increasing net social wage has distinctly different implications in the two countries due to their specific historical trajectories in the neoliberal era. In the US, the increasing net social wage reflects an ambivalent and reluctant …

Inheritance And Financial Health: The Correlation Between Intergenerational Wealth Transfers And Income Levels Of Personal Bankruptcies, Benjamin D. Kahn

CMC Senior Theses

This paper describes the correlations between intergenerational wealth transfers, or IWTs, and income of households in bankruptcy as existing research does not address any linkage between the two events. The effect that inheritances, trust payments, and lump sum gifts have on personal finances will impact the millions of Americans who will receive such transfers during the “Great Wealth Transfer” of the coming decades. I use bankruptcy data from the Federal Judicial Center’s Integrated Database, or IDB, and income data from the University of Michigan’s Panel Survey of Income Dynamics, or PSID, to produce a dataset that contains average IWT values …

Neoliberal Redistributive Policy: The U.S. Net Social Wage In The 21st Century, Katherine A. Moos

PERI Working Papers

In this paper, I examine the trends of fiscal transfers between the state and workers during 1959 - 2012 to understand the net impact of redistributive policy in the United States. This paper presents original net social wage data from and analysis based on the replication and extension of Shaikh and Tonak (2002). The paper investigates the appearance of a post-2001 variation in the net social wage data. The positive net social wage in the 21st century is the result of a combination of factors including the growth of income support, healthcare inflation, neoliberal tax reforms, and macroeconomic instability. Growing …

Neoliberal Redistributive Policy: The U.S. Net Social Wage In The 21st Century, Katherine A. Moos

Economics Department Working Paper Series

In this paper, I examine the trends of fiscal transfers between the state and workers during 1959 - 2012 to understand the net impact of redistributive policy in the United States. This paper presents original net social wage data from and analysis based on the replication and extension of Shaikh and Tonak (2002). The paper investigates the appearance of a post-2001 variation in the net social wage data. The positive net social wage in the 21st century is the result of a combination of factors including the growth of income support, healthcare inflation, neoliberal tax reforms, and macroeconomic instability. Growing …

Effort, Luck, And Voting For Redistribution, Lars J. Lefgren, David P. Sims, Olga B. Stoddard

Faculty Publications

We conduct an experiment to determine how the correspondence between economic rewards and effort, as opposed to luck, affects subjects' ex post voting over redistribution. We find that a large, statistically significant proportion of both high- and low-payoff voters are willing to vote contrary to their self-interest in favor of groups that exert proportionately more effort. We confirm these results in an additional, distinct sample. We also show that when subjects' own effort is greater than the group's average effort level, they exhibit greater self interest in voting for redistribution compared to subjects whose effort is below average. Our results …

Designing Survey Methods To Evaluate The Undeclared Economy: A Review Of The Options, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

This Working Paper is part of the GREY project which is developing capacities and capabilities in tackling undeclared work. In this Working Paper, the various options available to researchers when designing surveys to tackle undeclared work are evaluated. These issues include the unit of analysis used, the data collection methodology, an array of questionnaire design issues (including the reference period, whether to define the phenomenon for participants, a direct versus gradual approach to sensitive issues, whether to do a supply- and/or demand-side survey; whether to examine the relationship between purchasers and sellers, how to discourage social desirability bias), sample size, …

Malaysian Tax System And Individual Tax Knowledge, Noraza Mat Udin

NORAZA MAT UDIN

No abstract provided.

Essays On The Political Geography Of The United States Of America, Wesley Harris

All Dissertations

The Correlation between income and voting is very different based on what part of the country a voter resides. In rural areas, there is a strong and negative correlation between income and probability of voting for a Democratic Presidential Candidate, while in urban areas, the correlation is much weaker. This paper shows that once you control for not only individual specific characteristics of voters but also geographic characteristics such as racial diversity, population density, and economic diversity, the regional differences between the effects of income on voting disappears. One potential explanation for this geographical significance is in urban areas the …

Tackling The Undeclared Economy In Fyr Macedonia: A Baseline Assessment, Rositsa Dzhekova, Josip Franic, Lyubo Mishkov, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

This report provides a detailed review of available evidence on the extent and nature of the undeclared economy in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), as well as on the institutional actors involved in tackling the phenomenon and their policy approach and measures used.

Extent and nature of the undeclared economy

Some widely cited international measurements that cover FYROM find that the share of its undeclared economy is larger than in all EU Member States, estimated at 35% of GDP in 2007 (Schneider et al, 2010). Data from the most recent national Labour Force Survey suggests that in 2012 …

Undeclared Work In Croatia: A Baseline Assessment, Josip Franic, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

The aim of this report is to evaluate the extent and nature of undeclared work in Croatia and the policy approaches and measures currently employed to tackle this sphere. Extent and nature of undeclared work In recent years, there have been substantial efforts to reduce undeclared work in Croatia. Faced with significant deficits in the public budget, the government has sought effective policy responses that would result in increased compliance. Nonetheless, it is hard to know whether these strategies are resulting in a decrease in the prevalence of undeclared work. While some studies of the magnitude of undeclared work suggest …

A Market For Tax Compliance, Walter E. Afield Iii

Walter E Afield III

It is becoming increasingly clear that, due to political realities and budgetary constraints, the IRS is going to have to attempt to enforce the tax laws by doing more with less. Current enforcement efforts have yielded a tax gap (i.e., the difference between the amount of taxes that should be paid and the amount that are collected) of roughly $450 billion annually. Faced with this task, one of the steps that the IRS has recently taken is to try to improve the quality in services performed by paid tax preparers, a group that historically has been subject to little IRS …

The Shadow Economy, Colin C. Williams, Friedrich Schneider

Colin C Williams

No abstract provided.

Tackling Undeclared Work In Montenegro, Colin C. Williams, Marijana Baric, Piet Renooy

Colin C Williams

No abstract provided.

Critical Tax Policy: A Pathway To Reform?, Nancy J. Knauer

Nancy J. Knauer

The Global Recession of 2008 and ensuing austerity measures have renewed the urgency surrounding the call for fundamental tax reform. Before embarking on fundamental tax reform, this Article proposes adding a critical lens to existing US tax policy to ensure that any proposals for change are informed, transparent, and responsive to the needs (and abilities) of individual taxpayers. This Article makes the case for a specific method of inquiry – Critical Tax Policy – that is built on the articulation of difference rather than false assumptions of sameness. Critical Tax Policy incorporates the insights of a growing international tax equity …

The Effects Of Infrastructure Development And Taxation On Current And Future Earnings, Mukta Mukherjee

Economics - Dissertations

This dissertation is a collection of three essays, each of which studies a policy in India that provides a unique circumstance affecting directly or indirectly earnings. The purpose of this work is to analyze how taxation and infrastructure development aspects the current and future earnings using these policies

In the first essay, I use a national infrastructure development program initiated in India in 2001 to construct new all-season roads (roads that can be used in all-weather especially monsoons) in villages that previously had only had dry-season roads (roads that are difficult to use in monsoons). In the second, I use …

Experimental Evidence Of Tax Salience And The Labor-Leisure Decision: Anchoring, Tax Aversion, Or Complexity?, Andrew Hayashi, Brent K, Nakamura, David Gamage

Andrew Hayashi

Recent research in marketing and public economics suggests that consumers underestimate the effects of taxes and surcharges on total purchase prices when taxes and surcharges are made less salient. The leading explanation is that consumers anchor on base prices and underadjust for surcharges. We perform experiments that: (1) extend the tax salience and price partitioning literatures to the labor supply context; (2) test the anchoring hypothesis by examining the effects of positive and negative wage surcharges on willingness to work; and (3) test whether responses to price partitioning result from imperfect calculation of all-inclusive prices or from deeper preferences. We …

A Preface To Neoclassical Legal Thought, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Most legal historians speak of the period following classical legal thought as “progressive legal thought.” That term creates an unwarranted bias in characterization, however, creating the impression that conservatives clung to an obsolete “classical” ideology, when in fact they were in many ways just as revisionist as the progressives legal thinkers whom they critiqued. The Progressives and New Deal thinkers whom we identify with progressive legal thought were nearly all neoclassical, or marginalist, in their economics, but it is hardly true that all marginalists were progressives. For example, the lawyers and policy makers in the corporate finance battles of the …

The Elasticity Of Taxable Income During The 1990s: New Estimates And Sensitivity Analyses, Seth H. Giertz

Department of Economics: Faculty Publications

Over the past two decades, the elasticity of taxable income has emerged as the central parameter for assessing efficiency and revenue implications from changes to tax policy. This article estimates short- and longer-run responses of taxable (and gross) income to changes in tax rates using panels of U.S. tax returns for the 1990s. With the richest set of income controls, income-weighted elasticity estimates range from 0.19 to 0.33, depending on whether responses are measured over one- or three-year intervals. An alternative approach designed to capture delayed and anticipatory responses yields much larger estimates -- ranging from 0.43 over the short …

A Complete Property Right Amendment, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

The trend of the eminent domain reform and "Kelo plus" initiatives is toward a comprehensive Constitutional property right incorporating the elements of level of review, nature of government action, and extent of compensation. This article contains a draft amendment which reflects these concerns.

Finding New Constitutional Rights Through The Supreme Court’S Evolving “Government Purpose” Test Under Minimum Scrutiny, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

By now we all are familiar with the litany of cases which refused to find elevated scrutiny for so-called “affirmative” or “social” rights such as education, welfare or housing: Lindsey v. Normet, San Antonio School District v. Rodriguez, Dandridge v. Williams, DeShaney v. Winnebago County. There didn’t seem to be anything in minimum scrutiny which could protect such facts as education or housing, from government action. However, unobtrusively and over the years, the Supreme Court has clarified and articulated one aspect of minimum scrutiny which holds promise for vindicating facts. You will recall that under minimum scrutiny government’s action is …

At The Cross Roads: Us / Mexico Border Counties In Transition, Dennis L. Soden

IPED Technical Reports

In 1998, former Texas Comptroller John Sharp published Bordering the Future: Challenge and Opportunity in the Texas Border Region,which provided an assessment of the economic, political, and social condition of the Texas border counties. This report, commissioned by the US / Mexico Border Counties Coalition, extends those findings to all of the 24 U.S. counties that are contiguous with Mexico. As a region, if these 24 counties were the 51st state, how would they compare with the rest of the nation?

Breaking The Bank: Revisiting Central Bank Of Denver After Enron And Sarbanes-Oxley, Celia Taylor

ExpressO

No abstract provided.