Sales Tax Incentives for Economic Development: Why Shouldn't Production Exemptions Be General?

The Effect of the Sales Tax on Retail Prices and Employment: Evidence from Exemptions on Clothing

Using frequent state and local policy revisions of apparel tax exemptions in Connecticut, New York and Vermont, I study how the sales tax affects the retail market for apparel. First, I present new evidence on the effect of the sales tax on pre-tax prices, the pass-through rate. Unlike the previous literature on this topic, I employ detailed item-level data on prices, use large good-specific ch...

Reforming the Tax Base for Economic Development

Tax reform has been an integral part of the economic reforms of most countries that have undertaken structural adjustment programmes. Even in the developed countries, tax reforms have been a prominent feature during the 1980s. One of the important reasons impelling governments of the developing countries embarking on economic reform programmes to undertake tax reform has been the need to cut th...

An Economic Production Quantity Model for Defective Items with Sales Return Service, Scrap Items and Rework

In this model, we establish an inventory model to determine the optimal inventory replenishment scheme for the economic production quantity (EPQ) model for imperfect, deteriorating items with sales return service under multiple production and rework setup. In one cycle, production process can produces the products in m production setups and reworks the defective items in one rework setup. The c...

The 'fat Tax': Economic Incentives to Reduce Obesity

Should the Federal Income Tax Be Replaced with a National Sales or Value-added Tax?

[Editor's Note: It appears that the question of changing the federal tax base will be part of the public debate for the foreseeable future. In a Brief that we published in April, Alan Auerbach of UC Berkeley summarized the effects and uncertainties of replacing the federal income tax with a federal flat tax. In the following discussion, Steven Sheffrin of UC Davis reviews several important issu...