Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(199)
- Faculty Publications (83)
- 2016
- Working Paper
Meet the Oligarchs: Business Legitimacy, State Capacity and Taxation
By: Rafael Di Tella, Juan Dubra and Alejandro Lagomarsino
We analyze the role of people’s beliefs about the rich in the determination of public policy in the context of a randomized online survey experiment. A question we study is the desirability of government-private sector meetings, a variable we argue is connected to... View Details
- July 2016
- Article
Taxation, Corruption, and Growth
By: Philippe Aghion, Ufuk Akcigit, Julia Cagé and William R. Kerr
We build an endogenous growth model to analyze the relationships between taxation, corruption, and economic growth. Entrepreneurs lie at the center of the model and face disincentive effects from taxation but acquire positive benefits from public infrastructure.... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Popular Acceptance of Inequality Due to Innate Brute Luck and Support for Classical Benefit-Based Taxation
U.S. survey respondents' views on distributive justice are shown to differ in two specific, related ways from what is conventionally assumed in modern optimal tax research. A large share of respondents, and in some cases a large majority, resist the full equalization... View Details
- Article
How Elastic Are Preferences for Redistribution? Evidence from Randomized Survey Experiments
By: Ilyana Kuziemko, Michael I. Norton, Emmanuel Saez and Stefanie Stantcheva
We analyze randomized online survey experiments providing interactive, customized information on U.S. income inequality, the link between top income tax rates and economic growth, and the estate tax. The treatment has large effects on views about inequality but only... View Details
- September 2014
- Article
Metropolitan Blueprints of Colonial Taxation? Lessons from Fiscal Capacity Building in British and French Africa, 1880-1940
By: Ewout Frankema and Marlous van Waijenburg
The historical and social science literature is divided about the importance of metropolitan blueprints of colonial rule for the development of colonial states. We exploit historical records of colonial state finances to explore the importance of metropolitan identity... View Details
Keywords: Colonial Administration; Quantitative Sources; Governance; Money; Taxation; Trade; History; Africa
- 2014
- Article
Unequality: Who Gets What and Why It Matters
Who should get what, and what are the consequences? Economic inequality in the United States has been rising for decades, yet only recently have behavioral scientists explored two central questions surrounding the optimal level of inequality. First, what are the... View Details
- Summer 2013
- Other Article
The Roots of Our Tax Debates
Our fiscal debates are endlessly frustrating. The outlines of a compromise seem clear, yet both sides remain incapable of agreement. But is the proper balance between spending less and taxing more really so obvious? A look at what underlies the political wars over... View Details
- February 2013
- Article
Institutions and Venture Capital
By: Josh Lerner and Joacim Tag
We survey the literature on venture capital and institutions and present a case study comparing the development of the venture capital market in the United States and Sweden. Our literature survey underscores that the legal environment, financial market development,... View Details
Keywords: Venture Capital; Organizations; Taxation; Entrepreneurship; Financial Markets; United States; Sweden
- January 2013 (Revised October 2015)
- Case
Pittsburgh
By: Eric Werker, Meg Rithmire, Benjamin Kennedy and Andrew Knauer
The case narrates the development of Pittsburgh from the 1940s to 2012. It analyzes the collapse of the steel industry in the early 1980s, the city's subsequent decline, and the city's later re-emergence as a hub for higher education, the tech sector, and the... View Details
Keywords: Google; Population; City Growth; Shale; PNC; Tom Murphy; Luke Ravenstahl; Public-private Partnership; Tax Increment Financing; Brownfields; Renaissance; Industry Clusters; Industry Growth; City; Business and Government Relations; Taxation; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Nonprofit Organizations; Higher Education; Technology Industry; Health Industry; Steel Industry; Education Industry; Pittsburgh
- Article
Tax Policy and the Efficiency of U.S. Direct Investment Abroad
By: Mihir A. Desai, C. Fritz Foley and James R. Hines Jr.
Deferral of U.S. taxes on foreign source income is commonly characterized as a subsidy to foreign investment, as reflected in its inclusion among "tax expenditures" and occasional calls for its repeal. This paper analyzes the extent to which tax deferral and other... View Details
- July–August 2012
- Article
A Better Way to Tax U.S. Businesses
By: Mihir Desai
The article argues that U.S. taxation reform should reduce corporate taxes, incorporate an awareness of the global marketplace, and generate revenue-neutral incentives for innovation. According to the article, a reduction in corporate tax rates would be offset by a tax... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
~Why Do We Redistribute so Much but Tag so Little? Normative Diversity, Equal Sacrifice and Optimal Taxation
Tagging is a free lunch in conventional optimal tax theory because it eases the classic tradeoff between efficiency and equality. But tagging is used in only limited ways in tax policy. I propose one explanation: conventional optimal tax theory has yet to capture the... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
De Gustibus non est Taxandum: Heterogeneity in Preferences and Optimal Redistribution
By: Benjamin B Lockwood and Matthew Weinzierl
The prominent but unproven intuition that preference heterogeneity reduces redistribution in a standard optimal tax model is shown to hold under the plausible condition that the distribution of preferences for consumption relative to leisure rises, in terms of... View Details
- October 2011 (Revised October 2011)
- Supplement
Barack Obama and the Bush Tax Cuts (B)
By: Matthew Weinzierl and Jacob Kuipers
President Obama signs a major fiscal stimulus package and then must debate whether to extend the Bush tax cuts.
Instructors may also obtain a Teaching Note, written by this case supplement's author, that provides suggestions for using this case supplement... View Details
Instructors may also obtain a Teaching Note, written by this case supplement's author, that provides suggestions for using this case supplement... View Details
- October 2011 (Revised October 2011)
- Teaching Note
Barack Obama and the Bush Tax Cuts (TN) (B)
By: Matthew Weinzierl and Jacob Kuipers
Teaching Note for 712-012. View Details
- October 2011
- Article
The Surprising Power of Age-Dependent Taxes
This article provides a new, empirically driven application of the dynamic Mirrleesian framework by studying a feasible and potentially powerful tax reform: age-dependent labor income taxation. I show analytically how age dependence improves policy on both the... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
Tax Policy and the Efficiency of U.S. Direct Investment Abroad
By: Mihir A. Desai, C. Fritz Foley and James R. Hines Jr.
Deferral of U.S. taxes on foreign source income is commonly characterized as a subsidy to foreign investment, as reflected in its inclusion among "tax expenditures" and occasional calls for its repeal. This paper analyzes the extent to which tax deferral and other... View Details
- June 2011
- Article
Watch What I Do, Not What I Say: The Unintended Consequences of the Homeland Investment Act
By: Dhammika Dharmapala, C. Fritz Foley and Kristin J. Forbes
This paper analyzes the impact of the Homeland Investment Act of 2004, which provided a one-time tax holiday for the repatriation of foreign earnings and thereby reduced the cost to U.S. multinationals of accessing a source of internal capital. Lawmakers and lobbyists... View Details
- March 2011 (Revised December 2019)
- Case
Wealth Management Crisis at UBS (A)
By: Paul M. Healy
The case describes the challenges that UBS faced as a result of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation for tax fraud, that claimed that UBS had helped some 52,000 U.S. residents hide billions of dollars in untaxed assets in secret Swiss accounts between... View Details
Keywords: Fraud; Regulatory Enforcement; Reputation Incentives; Crony Capitalism; Tax Havens; Legitimacy; Multinational; Strategic Change; Incentives; Transparency; Financial Services; Taxation; Crime and Corruption; Global Range; Asset Management; Ethics; Problems and Challenges; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Corporate Governance; Financial Services Industry; United States; Switzerland