State governments have traditionally raised revenue from business by taxing corporate income. But in recent years the growing difficulty of administering state corporate income taxes has prompted a search for alternative ways of taxing companies. This search for new business taxes has ironically sparked a resurgence in one of the world’s oldest broad-based tax structures: the gross receipts tax...

Do husbands and wives have the same view of the family’s financial situation? This research shows that when couples are asked separately about finances, very different views emerge of income and wealth. Quantifying the gap between husbands’ and wives’ financial statements shows half of all couples provide family income values that differ by more than 10% and net worth values that differ by more...

The incomes of continuing participants in a workfare program in Argentina are compared to those of a matched comparison group of non-participants and with a matched group of past participants who leave the program. We find partial income replacement, amounting to one-quarter of the gross workfare wage within six months of leaving the program, rising to one half in 12 months. The estimates are u...

This paper examines the permanent and transitory effects of changes in wealth, the top federal marginal income tax rate, and capital gains tax rate on the distribution of Adjusted Gross Income (AGI). This paper establishes the importance of wealth in determining the distribution of AGI, and results here suggest that its effects can negate the permanent effect of a change in both tax rates. Of t...

This study investigates the effects of gender on aggregate saving. We test the hypothesis that shifts in women’s relative income, which can affect their bargaining power within the household, have a discernible impact on household saving and, by extension, gross domestic saving, due to differing saving propensities by gender. The empirical analysis is based on panel data for a set of semi-indus...

In 2007, The Lancet declared that early childhood development was a global challenge of the greatest urgency. 4 years later, we have made progress, but still have far to go in making early childhood development the global priority it must be. The importance of early childhood development remains profound. As the accompanying papers in The Lancet show so clearly, the prenatal and postnatal perio...