National Tax Journal articles from June 1997

National Tax Journal archives from June 1997

How big should government be?
June 1, 1997... The central public finance question facing any country is the appropriate size of its government.(1) Although economics alone cannot provide an answer to this question, economists can help politicians and the public to analyze the question in the...

How much more is a good school district worth?
June 1, 1997... INTRODUCTION How much is your local public school worth? How much is your municipal government worth? These questions have been at the heart of the vast literature on the capitalization of taxes and public services into house values....

Who pays the gasoline tax?
June 1, 1997... INTRODUCTION The taxation of gasoline is a highly contentious issue in the United States. Despite the fact that the combined federal and state tax rate on gasoline in the United States is approximately one-fifth of the average rate in...

The impact of federal taxes on the use of debt by closely held corporations.
June 1, 1997... INTRODUCTION The influence of income taxation on firms' capital structure decisions is a fundamental tax policy issue. It is often asserted that income taxes encourage firms to use debt in their capital structures because interest expense...

Voluntary binding arbitration as an alternative to Tax Court litigation.
June 1, 1997... INTRODUCTION Tax Court Rule 124 permits any factual issue to be resolved via voluntary binding arbitration rather than litigation. Since the rule's adoption in 1990, at least 20 cases, primarily involving valuation disputes, have used...

Reply to Diamond's and Cutler's reviews of generational accounting. (response to David Cutler, National Tax Journal, vol. 46, p. 61, March 1993, and Peter Diamond, National Tax Journal, vol. 49, p. 597, December 1996)
June 1, 1997... INTRODUCTION Generational accounting is less than seven years old, but it has spread around the world, from Norway to New Zealand. So far, 16 countries have constructed generational accounts and other countries are following suit.(1) Most...

Indexed bonds, expected inflation, and tax clientele bias.
June 1, 1997... INTRODUCTION In December 1996, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that the first inflation-indexed security auction would be held in January 1997. This follows statements recently expressed by The Federal Reserve System concerning the...

Further evidence on the dynamic impact of taxes on charitable giving.
June 1, 1997... In this paper, we estimate the effects of tax policy on charitable donations using a panel of 1,382 individual tax returns from the years 1979-86. We do so in order to provide additional evidence on the efficiency of tax incentives for giving, to...

Beyond tax relief: long-term challenges in financing higher education.(Symposium on Tax Treatment of Higher Education)
June 1, 1997... INTRODUCTION In his 1997 State of the Union address, President Clinton declared educational reform the top priority of his second term. Indeed, the Administration's agenda for higher education is unabashedly ambitious, to "...make the...

A principled approach to education policy.(Symposium on Tax Treatment of Higher Education)
June 1, 1997... In recent years, policymakers and researchers alike have devoted increased attention to human capital as a primary source of economic growth. The heed once given to the building of large factories and the use of physical resources has been...

Federal Taxation in America: A Short History.
June 1, 1997... By W. ELLIOT BROWNLEE, New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. 190. W. Elliot Brownlee, Professor of History at the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California, has added two important books to...

Funding the Modern American State: 1941-1995, The Rise and Fall of the Era of Easy Finance.
June 1, 1997... Edited by W. ELLIOT BROWNLEE, New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. 467. W. Elliot Brownlee, Professor of History at the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California, has added two important...

Frontiers of Tax Reform.
June 1, 1997... Edited by MICHAEL J. BOSKIN. Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press, 1996. Pp. 202. Tax reform is in vogue once again. Few topics in economics have been written about more over recent years than has tax reform. In the past year alone,...

Empirical Foundations of Household Taxation.
June 1, 1997... Edited by MARTIN FELDSTEIN AND JAMES M. POTERBA. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pp. 289. This is a useful compendium of research papers on how households respond to taxation, written clearly without excessive jargon...