IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/5009.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Tax Projections and the Budget: Lessons from the 1980s

Author

Listed:
  • Alan J. Auerbach

Abstract

Some economists have argued that the disincentive effects of marginal tax rate increases in the 1980s caused revenue to rise by less than had been anticipated. To evaluate the hypothesis, this paper considers OMB revenue forecasts and forecast errors for the period 1982-93. If the revenue gains from tax increases, and the revenue losses from tax cuts, were overstated because of inadequate allowance for behavioral responses, then the forecast errors should be negatively related to the initial revenue estimates of the impact of policy changes. For excise taxes and corporate income taxes, the results suggest that the systematic overprediction of revenues during the period can be explained in part by an underestimate of behavioral responses to taxation.

Suggested Citation

  • Alan J. Auerbach, 1995. "Tax Projections and the Budget: Lessons from the 1980s," NBER Working Papers 5009, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:5009
    Note: PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w5009.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Daniel R. Feenberg & James M. Poterba, 1993. "Income Inequality and the Incomes of Very High-Income Taxpayers: Evidence from Tax Returns," NBER Chapters, in: Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 7, pages 145-177, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Andrew Haughwout & Robert Inman & Steven Craig & Thomas Luce, 2000. "Local Revenue Hills: A General Equilibrium Specification with Evidence from Four U.S. Cities," NBER Working Papers 7603, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Vasconcelos de Deus, Joseph David Barroso & de Mendonça, Helder Ferreira, 2017. "Fiscal forecasting performance in an emerging economy: An empirical assessment of Brazil," Economic Systems, Elsevier, vol. 41(3), pages 408-419.
    3. Chimilila, Cyril, 2017. "Forecasting Tax Revenue and its Volatility in Tanzania," African Journal of Economic Review, African Journal of Economic Review, vol. 5(1), January.
    4. Zidong An & Joao Tovar Jalles, 2020. "On the performance of US fiscal forecasts: government vs. private information," Journal of Economic Studies, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 48(2), pages 367-391, June.
    5. Mr. Marcos Poplawski Ribeiro & Jan-Christoph Rülke, 2011. "Fiscal Expectations Under the Stability and Growth Pact: Evidence from Survey Data," IMF Working Papers 2011/048, International Monetary Fund.
    6. Feldstein, Martin, 1997. "How Big Should Government Be?," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association, vol. 50(2), pages 197-213, June.
    7. Cronin, David & McQuinn, Kieran, 2023. "Government debt forecast errors and the net expenditure rule in EU countries: Undue optimism at a cost," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 45(6), pages 1113-1131.
    8. Lledó, Victor & Poplawski-Ribeiro, Marcos, 2013. "Fiscal Policy Implementation in Sub-Saharan Africa," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 46(C), pages 79-91.
    9. Rossana Merola & Javier J. Pérez, 2012. "Fiscal forecast errors: governments vs independent agencies?," Working Papers 1233, Banco de España.
    10. Feldstein, Martin, 1997. "How Big Should Government Be?," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 50(2), pages 197-213, June.
    11. de Mendonça, Helder Ferreira & Baca, Adriana Cabrera, 2022. "Fiscal opacity and reduction of income inequality through taxation: Effects on economic growth," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 83(C), pages 69-82.
    12. António Afonso & Rui Carvalho, 2014. "Revenue Forecast Errors in the European Union," Working Papers Department of Economics 2014/02, ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Department of Economics, Universidade de Lisboa.
    13. Alan J. Auerbach, 1996. "Dynamic Revenue Estimation," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 10(1), pages 141-157, Winter.
    14. Ley, Eduardo & Misch, Florian, 2013. "Real-time macro monitoring and fiscal policy," Policy Research Working Paper Series 6303, The World Bank.
    15. Hayley Pallan, 2022. "Sovereign Spreads and Corporate Taxation," IHEID Working Papers 15-2022, Economics Section, The Graduate Institute of International Studies.
    16. Arai, Natsuki, 2020. "Investigating the inefficiency of the CBO’s budgetary projections," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(4), pages 1290-1300.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Thomas Blanchet & Juliette Fournier & Thomas Piketty, 2022. "Generalized Pareto Curves: Theory and Applications," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 68(1), pages 263-288, March.
    2. Arindam Das-Gupta & Ira Gang, 2000. "Decomposing Revenue Effects of Tax Evasion and Tax Structure Changes," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 7(2), pages 177-194, March.
    3. Anthony B. Atkinson & Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez, 2011. "Top Incomes in the Long Run of History," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 49(1), pages 3-71, March.
    4. Basil Dalamagas, 2011. "A Dynamic Approach to Tax Evasion," Public Finance Review, , vol. 39(2), pages 309-326, March.
    5. Frank Denton & Dean Mountain, 2014. "The implications of mean scaling for the calculation of aggregate consumer elasticities," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 12(3), pages 297-314, September.
    6. Zelda Okatch & Abu Siddique & Anu Rammohan, 2013. "Determinants of Income Inequality in Botswana," Economics Discussion / Working Papers 13-15, The University of Western Australia, Department of Economics.
    7. Kroh Tanja, 2016. "Wie wirken Steuern auf die Einkommens- und Vermögensverteilung?," Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftspolitik, De Gruyter, vol. 65(1), pages 022-046, May.
    8. Austan Goolsbee, 1998. "It's Not About the Money: Why Natural Experiments Don't Work on the Rich," NBER Working Papers 6395, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Ira N. Gang & Arindam Das-Gupta, 1998. "Decomposing Revenue Effects of Tax Evasion, Base Broadening and Tax Rate Reduction," Departmental Working Papers 199506, Rutgers University, Department of Economics.
    10. Peter Scott & James Walker, 2018. "The Comfortable, the Rich, and the Super-rich. What Really Happened to Top British Incomes During the First Half of the Twentieth Century?," John H Dunning Centre for International Business Discussion Papers jhd-dp2018-07, Henley Business School, University of Reading.
    11. Wojciech Kopczuk, 2015. "What Do We Know about the Evolution of Top Wealth Shares in the United States?," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 29(1), pages 47-66, Winter.
    12. Hernan Winkler, 2019. "The effect of income inequality on political polarization: Evidence from European regions, 2002–2014," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 31(2), pages 137-162, July.
    13. James M. Poterba & Daniel R. Feenberg, 2000. "The Income and Tax Share of Very High-Income Households, 1960-1995," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(2), pages 264-270, May.
    14. Emmanuel Saez, 2017. "Taxing the Rich More: Preliminary Evidence from the 2013 Tax Increase," Tax Policy and the Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 31(1), pages 71-120.
    15. Richard Burkhauser & Shuaizhang Feng & Stephen Jenkins & Jeff Larrimore, 2011. "Estimating trends in US income inequality using the Current Population Survey: the importance of controlling for censoring," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 9(3), pages 393-415, September.
    16. Yin-Chi Wang & Ping Wang & Chong Yip & Pei-Ju Liao, 2017. "Educational Choice, Rural-urban Migration and Economic Development: The Role of Zhaosheng in China," 2017 Meeting Papers 738, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    17. Joel Slemrod, 1996. "High-Income Families and the Tax Changes of the 1980s: The Anatomy of Behavioral Response," NBER Chapters, in: Empirical Foundations of Household Taxation, pages 169-192, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    18. Burdín, Gabriel & De Rosa, Mauricio & Vigorito, Andrea & Vilá, Joan, 2022. "Falling inequality and the growing capital income share: Reconciling divergent trends in survey and tax data," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 152(C).
    19. David E. Altig & Charles T. Carlstrom, 1995. "Marginal tax rates and income inequality: a quantitative-theoretic analysis," Working Papers (Old Series) 9508, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
    20. Krueger, Alan B. & Mueller, Andreas I., 2011. "Job Search and Job Finding in a Period of Mass Unemployment: Evidence from High-Frequency Longitudinal Data," IZA Discussion Papers 5450, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H30 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - General
    • H61 - Public Economics - - National Budget, Deficit, and Debt - - - Budget; Budget Systems

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:5009. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.