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Essays In Contemporary Tax Law Changes, Arpita Biswas

All Dissertations

In the first essay, I provide estimates of price and income elasticities of charitable contributions which reveal substantial differences in giving patterns across different income groups. The paper develops an intertemporal model of giving which predicts that lowering current income taxes induces substitution away from current giving towards giving in future periods. Cragg's Generalized Tobit model applied to Consumer Expenditure data from 1997-2006 provides estimates of income and price elasticities conditioned upon contribution, which range between 0.17 to 0.81 and −0.50 to −1.16 respectively. Empirical analysis shows substantial evidence of intertemporal substitution, implying that if the difference between future and …