The federal tax system imposes a number of excise taxes on goods and services such as gasoline, alcohol, tobacco, air travel, and health care. In fiscal year 2014, the federal government raised $93.4 billion or 0.5 percent of GDP from excise taxes, accounting for about 3 percent of total federal...

We examine how tax policies alter investment incentives, with a particular focus on startup and innovative businesses. Consistent with prior work, we find that existing policies impose widely varying effective tax rates on investments in different industries and activities, favor debt over...

This paper evaluates six options to achieve across-the-board reductions to a group of major exclusions and deductions in the income tax: (1) limiting their tax benefit to a maximum percentage of income; (2) imposing a fixed dollar cap; (3) reducing them by a fixed-percentage amount; (4) limiting...

This paper applies tax incidence theory to estimate the distributional effects of the exemption from federal income tax of interest on state and local bonds and the President's proposal to limit the benefit of the exemption to the 28 percent rate. When one accounts for the effects of changes in...