Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Can A Payroll Tax Cut For Women Narrow The Gender Gap?, Enrico Rubolino

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.

Multinational Firms And Tax Havens, Anna Gumpert, James R. Hines Jr., Monika Schnitzer

Articles

Multinational firms with operations in high-tax countries can benefit the most from reallocating taxable income to tax havens, though this is sufficiently difficult and costly that only 20.4% of German multinational firms have any tax haven affiliates. Among German manufacturing firms, a 1 percentage point higher foreign tax rate is associated with a 2.3% greater likelihood of owning a tax haven affiliate. This is consistent with tax avoidance incentives and contrasts with earlier evidence for U.S. firms. The relationship is less strong for firms in service industries, possibly reflecting the difficulty of reallocating taxable service income.

Essays In Economics Of Institutions And Culture, Luiza Valeriyevna Pogorelova

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I present two distinct essays in economics of culture and institutions that can be read independently from one another. In Chapter 2, using the European Social Survey data, I investigate the impact of increased educational attainment, induced by compulsory schooling reforms, on religiosity and superstitious beliefs. I find consistently negative effects of education on religiosity, superstitious beliefs, social religious acts (attending religious services) and solitary religious acts (the frequency of praying). In Chapter 3, I examine the impact of “culture of leisure” and tax rates on labor force participation and hours worked of second-generation immigrants residing in …

How To Strike The Wealth Balance, Shaomin Li, Seung Ho Park

Management Faculty Publications

The underlying attitude towards wealth within a country can have a big impact on a company's decision to invest there. Shaomin Li and Seung Ho Park look at ways in which 'wealth tolerance' can be measured.

On The Future Of Tax Salience Scholarship: Operative Mechanisms And Limiting Factors, David Gamage

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Essay — written for Florida State University’s symposium on the 100th anniversary of the U.S. federal income tax — evaluates how the literature on tax salience should be advanced in order for it to better guide tax policy over the coming decades. The literature on tax salience analyzes how taxpayers account for the costs imposed by taxation when the taxpayers make decisions or judgments, both in the taxpayers’ roles as voters and as market participants. This Essay evaluates both possible operative mechanisms that might underlie observed tax salience effects and limiting factors that might prevent tax salience effects from …

Does Country Size Matter For Tax Rates?, Mohammad Amin

Mohammad Amin

Repeated attempts at uncovering the impact of country size on various socio-economic factors have shown that country size doesn’t matter except for trade openness. The present paper takes another look at the relevance of country size. Using newly available macro as well as firm-level micro data on tax rates, the paper finds tax rates are more burdensome in the relatively larger countries. The finding is robust to a large number of controls, alternative specifications and estimation methods including the instrumental variables regression method. Further, we find some evidence suggesting that the strength of the relationship between tax rates and country …

Preventing State Budget Crises: Managing The Fiscal Volatility Problem, David Gamage

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Forty-nine of the U.S. states have balanced budget requirements, and every state acts as though bound by such constraints. These constraints create fiscal volatility - the states must either cut spending or raise taxes during economic downturns, while doing the opposite during upturns. This paper discusses how states should cope with fiscal volatility on both the levels of ordinary politics and of institutional-design policy. On the level of ordinary politics, the paper applies principles of risk allocation theory to conclude that states should primarily adjust the rates of broad-based taxes as their economies cycle, rather than fluctuating public spending. States …

Hot Topic: State Tax Rate On Utility Sales To Manufacturers, Al Major

MTAS Publications: Hot Topics

The manufacturer sales tax rate has become an issue as cities are updating their utility billing systems for the increased state sales tax.

Hot Topic: Changes In The Rate And Distribution Of The Business Tax Effective September 1, 2002, Dick Phebus

MTAS Publications: Hot Topics

2002 Tenn. Pub. Acts 856 (the Tax Reform Act of 2002) amends the business tax law, requiring businesses to pay fifty percent more in taxes when renewing business licenses.

Hot Topic: Changes To The State And Local Sales And Use Tax Return: Effective July 15, 2002, Dick Phebus

MTAS Publications: Hot Topics

Because the sales tax rate increase became effective July 15, 2002, reporting sales may be complicated due to the fact that a municipality may have taxable sales from July 1-14 at the old state rate of 6% and sales from July 15-31 at the new state rate of 7%.

Are Tax Rates Too Volatile?, Gregory Hess

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

The way in which a government chooses to raise tax revenue over time has attracted considerable attention both in the tax literature, and the political business cycle literature. The tax literature ahs emphasized planning problems where the government chooses taxes and a path for government debt to minimize the excess burden of taxes over time. Alternatively, the political business cycle models focus on the fiscal policies pursued by incumbent governments to either improve their reelection prospects or to constrain the policies that future governments in power will pursue.

This paper addresses the question of whether tax rates fluctuate “in excess” …

A Test Of The Theory Of Optimal Taxation For The United States, 1869-1989, Gregory Hess

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

A popular theory of optimal tax policies suggests that tax rates should follow a random walk. This paper extends the existing empirical literature in three ways. First, the impact on the marginal utility of consumption when the government chooses a tax plan to smooth the distorting impact of taxes is considered. Second, exogenous changes in the real rate of interest are incorporated into the government's optimal tax plan. Finally, the tax elasticity of output is not constant over time. Allowing for these changes, there is evidence that the government discounts the future, attempts to smooth the distorting impact of taxes …

Tax Rates And Tax Evasion: Evidence From California Amnesty Data, Steven E. Crane, Farrokh Nourzad

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

The effect of marginal tax rates on income tax evasion is examined using data from the California Tax Amnesty Program, which provided amnesty for people who had not filed returns, had filed inaccurate returns, or were delinquent in paying their tax liabilities. People under criminal investigation were not eligible. After correcting for the selectivity bias, it was found that tax evaders respond to higher marginal tax rates by increasing their evasion activity. The results also confirm the theoretical prediction that people with higher levels of income tend to evade more. The absolute and relative sizes of income and tax rate …

Inflation And Tax Evasion: An Empirical Analysis, Steven E. Crane, Farrokh Nourzad

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

This paper contains an analysis of the effect of inflation on aggregate tax evasion in the United States over the period 1947-81. It is found that tax evasion in both absolute and relative terms is positively related to the inflation rate. Further, the results indicate that aggregate evasion has risen in both absolute and relative terms with increases in the marginal tax rate, but has fallen with increases in the detection probability, the penalty rate, and the wage share of income. Finally, evasion has risen in absolute terms but has fallen in relative terms when real true income has risen.