How Reform-Friendly are U.S. Tax Treaties?

US Fertility and the Tax Reform Act of 1986

Marginal tax rate changes have the ability to affect fertility decisions by altering the opportunity cost of time through a change in the after-tax wage. Using a natural experiments framework developed to examine women’s labor force participation we investigate the effect of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 on marital fertility. The data were from the March Current Population Survey. We find the wome...

How 'child friendly' are you?

Bilateral Tax Treaties and GDP Comovement

Using a 30-year panel of quarterly GDP fluctuations from of a broad set of countries, we demonstrate that the signing of a bilateral tax treaty increases the comovement of treaty partners’ business cycles by 1/2 a standard deviation. This effect of fiscal policy is as large as the effect of trade linkages on comovement, and stronger than the effects of several other common financial and investm...

Double Tax Treaties and Their Interpretation

Tax Reform and Investment: How Big an Impact?

HE U.S. Congress has recently passed historic legislation that revises the fundamental structure of U.S. income tax law. Promoters of this legislation hope that the new tax system will encourage more productive use of economic resources and faster economic growth. Economists disagree very little about the general objectives of tax refor-m. The new law, however, has drawn significant criticism, ...