Toward an Agenda for Behavioral Public Finance
This essay is about the intersection -- or possible intersection -- between the fields of behavioral economics and public finance, which we call behavioral public finance.
View ArticleWhere's the Sex in Fiscal Sociology? Taxation and Gender in Comparative...
Tax and other fiscal policy systems inevitably affect patterns of work, marriage, household formation, child-bearing, and more. These "micro-level" concerns are important subjects for "fiscal...
View ArticleComments on Liebman and Zeckhauser, Simple Humans, Complex Insurance, Subtle...
These are brief comments on an excellent paper by Jeffrey Liebman and Richard Zeckhauser, prepared for a conference sponsored by the Urban Institute and Brookings on tax and health care policy. Liebman...
View ArticleBehavioral Public Finance
These are slides from a presentation to the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research, Squaw Valley Conference, May, 2008 (at which event Michael Jensen got me to agree to post these slides as a...
View ArticleA Consumed Income Tax: A Fair and Simple Plan for Tax Reform
These are slides from a presentation to the President's Advisory Panel on Tax Reform, given in Washington D.C. on May 11, 2005, updated, with additional slides, and sources at the end. The principal...
View ArticleShakedown at Gucci Gulch: A Tale of Death, Money & Taxes
Ever since Mancur Olson's The Logic Of Collective Action was published in 1965, if not before, the traditional conception of politics in Western democracies has given pride of place to special...
View ArticleTen Facts About Fundamental Tax Reform
This is a written version of testimony given to the Joint Economic Committee in November, 2003, subsequently published in Tax Notes. Meaningful simplification is possible, but depends on fundamental...
View ArticleBehavioral Dimensions of Tax Reform
These are powerpoint slides from a presentation at a joint UCLA-Tax Policy Center Conference on Tax Policy in the Obama Era. The basic insight is that it will be difficult to raise significant revenue...
View ArticleThe Last Best Hope for Progressivity in Tax
We argue that a spending tax, as opposed to an income or wage tax, is the "last best hope" for a return to significantly more progressive marginal tax rates than obtain today. The simple explanation...
View ArticleThrough the Looking Glass: The Politics of Estate Tax Reform
This brief article summarizes an argument that the estate tax reform or repeal debate has always been about money: not the government's money from the tax, which is modest at best, but the politicians...
View ArticleA Tale of Two Davids: Commentary on David Weisbach's "Implementing Income and...
This brief commentary on David Weisbach’s essay (available on ssrn at http://ssrn.com/abstract=911604) first identifies Weisbach’s contribution as stating an Equivalence Theorem: putting aside matters...
View ArticleBehavioral Economics and Fundamental Tax Reform
The most common use of the insights of behavioral economics in the cause of fundamental tax reform has been to argue for the employment of ad hoc tax-favored savings vehicles—such as individual...
View ArticleGood Hybrids/Bad Hybrids
Hybrid income-consumption taxes seek to tax some but not all savings, the treatment of savings being the principal difference between an income and a consumption tax. Some hybrids, however, simply...
View ArticleMasking Redistribution (or its Absence)
Research has shown that people vary widely in their support or opposition to progressive taxation. We argue here that the perception of progressiveness itself is affected by the nature of the tax...
View ArticleShakedown at Gucci Gulch: A Tale of Death, Money and Taxes
Ever since Mancur Olson's 1965 classic The Logic of Collective Action was published, the dominant view of politics in the academy and the popular understanding has featured the "special interest"...
View ArticleStarving the beast: The psychology of budget deficits
Many opponents of big government favor a strategy of "starving the beast," cutting taxes today with the expectation that spending cuts will follow tomorrow. Why might such a strategy work? Various...
View ArticleThe Political Psychology of Redistribution
Welfare economics suggests that the tax system is the appropriate place to effect redistribution from those with more command over material resources to those with less—that is, in short, to serve...
View ArticleThe Uneasy Case for Capital Taxation
The traditional view of tax holds that consumption taxes fail to tax the yield to capital, whereas income taxes do, leading to John Stuart Mill's criticism of the income tax as a "double tax" on...
View ArticleThinking About Tax
Behavioral economics and cognitive psychology have demonstrated that people deviate from ideal precepts of rationality in many settings, showing inconsistent judgment in the face of framing and other...
View ArticleThree Views of Tax
Traditional tax policy has been locked in a seemingly all-or-nothing debate between two apparent extremes, income and consumption taxation. But there are three choices of a comprehensive tax system,...
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