Essays on the construction and use of average marginal tax rates.

摘要

This dissertation consists of an introductory Prologue and five Chapters. Chapter One revises and extends average marginal federal income and Social Security tax rate series created in the mid-1980s. The revised and extended series are used to discuss the effects of federal tax legislation since 1980.;Chapter Two creates a panel of average marginal federal income tax rates across states. Although federal income tax statutes are uniform across states, differences in state attributes may lead to interstate variation in average marginal federal income tax rates. Straightforward regression analysis indicates that real income differences, price level differences, and differences in state income taxes are significant, both statistically and in magnitude, sources of interstate variation in average marginal federal income tax rates.;Chapter Three presents a panel of average marginal state income tax rates. Several inconsistencies attributable to differences in the states' tabulations of the underlying income tax returns are discussed and a modified panel of average marginal state income tax rates is created to ameliorate the inconsistencies. The modified average marginal state income tax rates are combined with the average marginal federal income tax rates of Chapter Two to create a panel of cumulative average marginal income tax rates.;In Chapter Four, the average marginal tax rate data are used in an estimation of the effect of taxes on the demand for a prominent form of tax-preferred compensation, employer-provided medical insurance. Rather than focusing on the effect of taxes per se, the chapter examines the sensitivity of empirical estimates to the choice of tax variable.;Chapter Five is a free-standing essay that develops a neoclassical growth model that incorporates both infrastructure investment and the taxation used to finance it. The model is estimated using cross-state data from 1969 to 1988, and particular emphasis is placed on the growth effects of government policies that increase infrastructure investment. The results indicate that the net effect of infrastructure investment and the taxation used to finance are not statistically different from zero.