Does the Investment Interest Limitation Explain the Existence of Dividends?

Miller and Scholes show that under certain conditions the Federal Income tax taxes dividend income at a rate no higher than the rate on capital gains. Tabulations of actual 1977 tax returns show that the special circumstances under which this can occur apply to less than 3% of dividend income and no significant role can be ascribed to their result in the determination of corporate dividend policy.

Identification in Tax-Price Regression Models: The Case of Charitable Giving

In this paper we use an instrumental variable estimator to exploit sources of independent variation, which allows unbiased estimation of the tax-price elasticity under more general conditions. The estimator is applied to the demand for charitable giving. A charitable giving equation is an appropriate test for this procedure because it represents the purest case of a tax-price coefficient. That is, taxes are the sole source of variance in the price. The deduction is also an important policy issue. In 1982, 1.8 percent of gross income was deducted for this reason, about as much as the capital gains deduction.

Recent Developments in the Marriage Tax

The new tax law increases tax rates of high income individuals, and expands the earned income tax credit for low income individuals. We use a sample of actual tax returns to compute estimates of the 'marriage tax' - the change in couples joint tax upon marriage - under this new law. We predict that in 1994 52 percent of American couples will pay a marriage tax, with an average of about $1,244; 38 percent will receive a subsidy averaging about$1,399. These aggregate figures mask a considerable amount of dispersion in the population. Under the new law, the marriage tax for certain low-income families can exceed $3,000 annually; for certain very high income families it can exceed$10,000 annually.

Promises, Promises: The States' Experience With Income Tax Indexing

The paper discusses five early approaches to the price (and quantity) index number problem. The five approaches are: (1) the fixed basket approach; (ii) the statistical approach; (iii) the test or axiomatic approach; (iv) the Divisia approach and (v) the economic approach. The economic approach makes use of the assumption of optimizing behavior under constraint and the approach is discussed under four subtopics: (i) basic theoretical definitions; (ii) the theory of bounds; (iii) exact index numbers and (iv) econometric estimation of preferences. The paper also discusses several topics raised by Jack Triplett in a recent paper, including: (i) the merits of the test approach to index number theory, (ii) the chain principle and alternatives to it; (iii) the substitution bias and (iv) the new good bias. Although the paper is for the most part an extensive historical survey, there are a few new results in section 8 on multilateral alternatives to the chain principle. Also in section 6.3, it is shown that the Paasche, Laspeyres and all superlative indexes will satisfy the circularity test to the first order.

State Personal Income and Sales Taxes: 1977-1983

The two main workhorses of state tax systems are levies on sales and individual incomes. In this paper we develop and implement a coherent methodology for characterizing these systems. The measures thus generated are used to show how the various systems differ across states, and how they evolved over the seven year period 1977-1983. We consider the systems' revenue elasticities with respect to income, average and marginal tax rates at various income levels, and several other issues as well.

The Deductibility of State and Local Taxes: Impact Effects by State and Income Class

This paper provides careful estimates of the impact of removing the deductibility of state and local taxes by state andby income class. We show how deductibility affects marginal and average tax rates for both state and federal tax systems. One striking result is that combined federal income tax and state tax burdens would generally fall under the President's tax reform proposal, even for high income people in high tax states.

Tax Structure and Public Sector Growth

It has been hypothesized that a jurisdiction's tax structure exerts an independent effect upon the growth of its public sector. We test this hypothesis by examining the relationship between the growth of state general expenditure and the elasticity of tax revenues with respect to income. The work takes advantage of a very careful set of income elasticities for the personal income and sales tax systems for each state, for every year from 1978 to 1983. The main conclusion is that the data do not support the notion that the form of the tax structure exerts an independent effect on public sector growth.