In the USA, little is known about local variation in retail cigarette prices; price variation explained by taxes, bans, and area-level socio-demographics, and whether taxes and hospitality bans have synergistic effects on smoking prevalence. Cigarette prices 2001-2011 from chain supermarkets and drug stores (n = 2973) were linked to state taxes (n = 41), state and county bar/restaurant smoking ...

Scholars tend to assume that publicly funded R&D projects, which are competitively selected, outperform receive funding through a political selection process. In this paper, we empirically explore assumption, examining the outcomes of 321 projects were by U.S. Department Energy's Hydrogen Program. Between 2003 and 2011, in program could not only means competitive process, but also being earmark...

Local governments in the United States typically rely on several main sources of own-source revenues, including individual income taxes, general sales taxes, specific excise taxes, fees and charges, and local property taxes. Of these sources, the dominant is by far the property tax. According to the United States Census Bureau (http://www.census.gov/govs/estimate), local property taxes accounte...

The debate on tobacco and fat taxes often treats smoking and eating as independent behaviors. However, the available evidence shows that they are interdependent, which implies that policies against smoking or obesity may have larger scope than expected. To address this issue, we propose a dynamic rational model where eating and smoking are simultaneous choices that jointly affect body weight an...

The integration of European financial markets of the 1980s created an environment of nearperfect capital mobility across countries that had harmonized indirect taxes but maintained large differences in factor taxes. The years that followed witnessed several rounds of competition in capital taxes with puzzling results. Instead of the dreaded “race to the bottom” in capital taxes, the U.K. lowere...

The high cost of lenient return policies force consumer electronics OEMs to look for ways to recover value from lightly used consumer returns, which constitute a substantial fraction of sales and cannot be re-sold as new products. Refurbishing to remarket or to fulfill warranty claims are the two common disposition options considered to unlock the value in consumer returns, which present the OE...

AIM To set out a policy analysis of food taxes as a way of influencing food consumption and behaviour. DESIGN The study draws on examples of food taxes from the developed world imposed at national and local levels. Studies were identified from a systemised search in six databases with criteria designed to identity articles of policy relevance. RESULTS The dominant approach identified from t...

On average, persons receiving Social Security benefits tend to have lower current incomes than do persons paying Social Security taxes. This article documents OASDI's income distributional patterns by dividing the 1992 Current Population Survey population into 10 income deciles and tabulating benefits received and taxes paid by each decile. The benefits and taxes, when compared with non-Social ...

Employment Effects of Payroll Taxes An Empirical Test for Germany* This study tests to what degree the incidence of payroll taxes in Germany is on employment and whether in consequence payroll taxes, in particular social insurance contributions, are the culprit behind the growing unemployment problem. Using industry level data for 18 years (1977-1994) we estimate a system of five interdependent...