Elena Patel, Lucas Goodman, and Molly Saunders-Scott, 2019. The authors contribute to an important and growing literature examining the behavior of passthrough business owners by using administrative tax data to investigate whether the income that owners of S-corporations receive from other sources is sensitive to negative shocks to pass-through income. [download pdf]

Nathan Seegert, 2019. The author develops an excessive risk index to quantify the amount of unnecessary risk governments accept when writing tax policy among uncertainty in private and public consumption. The author finds that the cost of inefficient risk for U.S. state governments is roughly 40% of their expected tax revenues and that this cost is [...]

Nathan Seegert, and Stephen Salant, 2019. In a study that uses a large, newly-available administrative dataset on U.S. corporate tax filings, the authors find that U.S. firms are more sensitive to changes in corporate income tax rate than previous studies suggest and that lowering the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25% would increase firm value [...]

Nathan Seegert and Eric Ohrn, 2019.In a study that examines the impact of shareholder taxation on the quality of mergers and acquisitions, the authors demonstrate how investor-level taxes can create a tax discount that distorts acquisition behavior and encourages firms to acquire more assets. This in turn decreases the return on acquired assets and the average [...]

Elena Patel, Naomi Feldman, Laura Kawano, Nirupama Rao, Michael Stevens and Jesse Edgerton, 2018. Using data from U.S. corporate tax returns, the authors find robust evidence that public firms invest more than private firms overall, particularly in research and development, and that firms dedicate more of their investment to research and development following an IPO. The [...]

Nathan Seegert, 2018. The author finds that 18 states have increased the riskiness of their tax portfolio since the Great Recession, while only five decreased the riskiness of their tax portfolio. However it was a need for revenue that drove many of these states to accept additional revenue volatility. Roughly half of the states that changed [...]

Elena Patel, Katherine Lim, and Molly Saunders-Scott, 2018. In a presentation prepared for the National Tax Association 2018 Spring Symposium, the authors examine changes to the tax treatment of S-corporation losses in the 2017 tax law and examine characteristics of S-corporations with losses, trends in losses over time, and comparisons to C-corporations. [download pdf]

Elena Patel and Nathan Seegert, 2017. The authors study an investment tax shock on U.S. hospitals and find that hospitals in concentrated markets increased investment by 5.0% ($2.1 million) more in response to tax incentives than firms in competitive markets. Further, firms’ investment responses monotonically increased with market concentration. [download pdf]

Adam Looney, 2017. The author finds that abuse of a tax deduction intended to encourage conservation of environmentally important land and historic buildings has cost the government billions of dollars of revenue while often doing little to advance environmental protection. [download pdf]

Adam Looney and Aaron Krupkion, 2017. To help understand the policy considerations surrounding the taxation of pass-through businesses and the implications of potential reforms, the authors present nine facts about pass-throughs and the current U.S. approach to taxing business. [download pdf]