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- February 2022
- Article
Taxation and Innovation in the 20th Century
By: Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby, Tom Nicholas and Stefanie Stantcheva
This paper studies the effect of corporate and personal taxes on innovation in the United States over the twentieth century. We build a panel of the universe of inventors who patent since 1920, and a historical state-level corporate tax database with corporate tax...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
The Incidence of the Corporate Income Tax Is Irrelevant for Its (Benefit-Based) Justification
Robust support for corporate income taxation is a puzzle for standard tax theory because the tax’s incidence is uncertain and unreliable. We propose a resolution: if the corporate tax is seen as a benefit-based tax, its normative appeal depends on the correspondence...
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- November 2021
- Article
A Salient Sugar Tax Decreases Sugary Drink Buying
By: Grant E. Donnelly, Paige Guge, Ryan Howell and Leslie John
Many governments have introduced sugary drink excise taxes to reduce purchasing and consumption of such drinks; however, they do not typically stipulate how such taxes should be communicated at point-of-purchase. Historical, field, and experimental data entailing over...
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Keywords:
Decision-making;
Open Data;
Open Materials;
Preregistered;
Health;
Policy;
Taxation;
Consumer Behavior;
Decision Making
- October 2021
- Case
Financial Reporting at Mattel
By: Aiyesha Dey, Trung Nguyen, Marshal Herrmann and Julia Kelley
In September 2020, Diana Ferguson was nearing her first Audit Committee meeting as the newly appointed Audit Committee chair of Mattel, Inc. Mattel was just recovering from an accounting scandal which had revealed the company’s poor internal controls and weak board...
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Keywords:
Accounting;
Accounting Audits;
Financial Reporting;
Financial Statements;
Governance;
Corporate Accountability;
Corporate Disclosure;
Corporate Governance;
Governance Compliance;
Governance Controls;
Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;
Governing and Advisory Boards;
Lawsuits and Litigation;
Business and Shareholder Relations;
Consumer Products Industry;
Entertainment and Recreation Industry;
Financial Services Industry;
North and Central America;
United States;
California
- August 2021
- Case
Livongo: Scaling a Purpose-Driven Organization in Healthcare
By: Ranjay Gulati, Aseem Shukla and Reva Nohria
When seasoned entrepreneur Glen Tullman founded the chronic health care startup Livongo in 2014, it was personal. His son lived with diabetes, and Tullman knew firsthand how taxing it could be to manage such an unrelenting disease. Livongo set out to empower people...
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- July 2021
- Case
Amazon HQ2
By: James K. Sebenius and Ben Cook
Amazon’s failed bid for a second headquarters location (“HQ2”) in Long Island City, New York offers many lessons for negotiators looking to avoid similar high-profile defeats in strategically important deals. The company’s project – which promised to bring billions of...
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- July 2021
- Article
Invisible Inequality Leads to Punishing the Poor and Rewarding the Rich
By: Oliver P. Hauser, Gordon T. Kraft-Todd, David Rand, Martin A. Nowak and Michael I. Norton
Four experiments examine how the lack of awareness of inequality affects behaviour towards the rich and poor. In Experiment 1, participants who became aware that wealthy individuals donated a smaller percentage of their income switched from rewarding the wealthy to...
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Keywords:
Income Transparency;
Income;
Wealth;
Equality and Inequality;
Knowledge;
Behavior;
Outcome or Result;
Society;
Policy
- June 15, 2021
- Article
Cutting the Gordian Knot of Employee Health Care Benefits and Costs: A Corporate Model Built on Employee Choice
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Barak D. Richman
President Joe Biden’s promise to give every American access to affordable health insurance is well-intentioned, but his plan’s policy elements—a public option, a permanent expanded tax credit—require congressional approval and would expend significant political and...
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- 2021
- Article
Designing, Not Checking, for Policy Robustness: An Example with Optimal Taxation
By: Benjamin B. Lockwood, Afras Sial and Matthew C. Weinzierl
Economists typically check the robustness of their results by comparing them across plausible ranges of parameter values and model structures. A preferable approach to robustness—for the purposes of policymaking and evaluation—is to design policy that takes these...
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- April 2021
- Supplement
Phillips 66 and the Washington State Carbon Tax (B)
By: Rebecca Henderson and Mariana Oseguera
- March 2021
- Case
Phillips 66 and the Washington State Carbon Tax
By: Rebecca Henderson, Mariana Oseguera and Christopher Musser
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Effects of Local Government Financial Distress: Evidence from Toxic Loans
By: Boris Vallée and Julien Sauvagnat
We examine the response from both local governments and their voters to a sudden increase in public debt burden. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the ex post cost of toxic loans, a notorious financial innovation adopted by a large number of local governments....
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Nonprofits in Good Times and Bad Times
By: Christine L. Exley, Nils H. Lehr and Stephen J. Terry
Need fluctuates over the business cycle, yet little is known about nonprofit behavior over the cycle. This paper exploits data from millions of tax returns and provides key descriptive facts about nonprofits in the face of economic fluctuations. Nonprofit revenue,...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Prioritarianism and Optimal Taxation
By: Matti Tuomala and Matthew C. Weinzierl
Prioritarianism has been at the center of the formal approach to optimal tax theory since its modern starting point in Mirrlees (1971), but most theorists’ use of it is motivated by tractability rather than explicit normative reasoning. We characterize analytically and...
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Keywords:
Prioritarianism;
Optimal Taxation;
Utilitarianism;
Redistribution;
Inverse-optimum;
Taxation;
Theory
- 2020
- Working Paper
Designing, Not Checking, for Policy Robustness: An Example with Optimal Taxation
By: Benjami Lockwood, Afras Y. Sial and Matthew C. Weinzierl
Economists typically check the robustness of their results by comparing them across plausible ranges of parameter values and model structures. A preferable approach to robustness—for the purposes of policymaking and evaluation—is to design policy that takes these...
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- November 2020
- Article
Taxation in Matching Markets
By: Arnaud Dupuy, Alfred Galichon, Sonia Jaffe and Scott Duke Kominers
We analyze the effects of taxation in two-sided matching markets, i.e., markets in which all agents have heterogeneous preferences over potential partners. In matching markets, taxes can generate inefficiency on the allocative margin by changing who is matched to whom,...
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- November 2020
- Article
The Role of Taxes in the Disconnect Between Corporate Performance and Economic Growth
By: Urooj Khan, Suresh Nallareddy and Ethan Rouen
We investigate the relation between the growth in corporate profits and the overall U.S. economy, focusing on the impact of the U.S. corporate tax regime on this relation. We document that the growth of corporate profits, on average, has outpaced the growth of the...
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- October 7, 2020
- Editorial
Time Confetti and the Broken Promise of Leisure
By: Ashley Whillans
It’s true: we have more time for leisure than we did fifty years ago. But leisure has never been less relaxing, mostly because of the disintermediating effects of our screens. Technology saves us time, but it also takes it away. This is known as the autonomy paradox....
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- September 2, 2020
- Article
How to Pay for Public Option Without Tax Hike
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Richard Boxer
A bipartisan combination of the two parties’ most popular initiatives can expand health care coverage, significantly reduce costs, and enable freedom of choice, without raising taxes. Along the way, we can revitalize competition between public and private plans. Our...
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- August 2020 (Revised November 2020)
- Case
George Soros: The Stateless Statesman
By: Geoffrey Jones and Wendy Ying
This case traces the business career and philanthropic activities of George Soros. The Hungarian-born Soros made a fortune as a hedge fund investor after establishing Quantum Fund on the tax haven island of Curaçao in the Netherlands Antilles in 1973 where he was...
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