Networks, Norms and National Tax Policy

Tax Policy and Corporate Borrowing

Aggregate statistics readily indicate why so many observers of financial markets in the United States are concerned about the balance between debt and equity in the corporate financial decision. Exceeding zero in most years before 1984, net equity issues by U.S. nonfinancial corporations have been negative in each year since. Net redemptions averaged approximately $80 billion annually during th...

Tax Policy and Retirement Savings ∗

Governments around the world spend hundreds of billions of dollars subsidizing retirement savings through various tax preferences. This paper reviews the economics literature on retirement savings, with a particular focus on recent advances using behavioral economics and high-quality administrative data. This literature suggests that tax subsidies may not be an effective policy to increase reti...

Tax Policy and Entrepreneurial Entry

While recent research has emphasized the desirability of studying effects of changes in marginal tax rates on taxable income, broadly defined, there has been comparatively little analysis of effects of marginal tax rate changes on entrepreneurial entry. This margin is likely to be important both because of the likely greater elasticity of entrepreneurial decisions with respect to tax changes (r...

Behavioral Economics and Tax Policy

Behavioral economics is changing our understanding of how economic policy operates, including tax policy. In this paper, we consider some implications of behavioral economics for tax policy, such as how it changes our understanding of the welfare consequences of taxation, the relative desirability of using the tax system as a platform for policy implementation, and the role of taxes as an eleme...

Health tax policy mismatch.