Tax policy debates—and reforms—depend heavily on estimates of how alternative tax rules would affect behavior. Yet there is considerable controversy about the key empirical links among tax rates, household decisions, and revenue collections.

The nine papers in this volume exploit the substantial variation in U.S. tax policy during the last two decades to investigate how taxes affect a range of household behavior, including labor-force participation, saving behavior, choice of health insurance plan, choice of child care arrangements, portfolio choice, and tax evasion. They also present new analytical results on the effects of different types of tax policy. All of this research relies on household-level data—drawn either from public-use tax return files or from large household-level surveys—to explore various aspects of the relationship between taxes and household behavior.

As debates about the effects of proposed tax reforms continue in the 1990s, this volume will be of interest to policy makers and scholars in the field of public finance.

The unprecedented rise and persistence of large-scale budget deficits in many developed and developing nations during the past three decades has caused great concern. The widespread presence of such deficits has proved difficult to explain. Their emergence in otherwise diverse nations defies particularistic explanations aimed at internal economic developments within a specific country.

Fiscal Institutions and Fiscal Performance shifts emphasis away from narrow economic factors to more broadly defined political and institutional factors that affect government policy and national debt. This collection brings together new theoretical models, empirical evidence, and a series of in-depth case studies to analyze the effect of political institutions, fiscal regulations, and policy decisions on accumulating deficits. It provides a fascinating overview of the political and economic issues involved and highlights the role of budgetary institutions in the formation of budget deficits.

Although Japan and the United States are the world's leading economies, there are significant differences in the ways their wealth is translated into living standards. A careful comparison of housing markets illustrates not only how living standards in the two countries differ, but also reveals much about saving patterns and how they affect wealth accumulation.

In this volume, ten essays discuss the evolution of housing prices, housing markets and personal savings, housing finance, commuting, and the impact of public policy on housing markets. The studies reveal surprising differences in housing investment in the two countries. For example, because down payments in Japan are much higher than in the United States, Japanese tend to delay home purchases relative to their American counterparts. In the United States, the advent of home equity credit may have reduced private saving overall.

This book is the first comparison of housing markets in Japan and the United States, and its findings illuminate the effects of housing markets on productivity growth, business investment, and trade.

Governments and corporations may chip in, but around the world houshold saving is the biggest factor in national saving. To better understand why saving rates differ across countries, this volume provides the most up-to-date analyses of patterns of household saving behavior in Canada, Italy, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Each of the six chapters examines micro data sets of household saving within a particular country and summarizes statistics on patterns of saving by age, income, and other demographic factors. The authors provide age-earning profiles and analyses of the accumulation of wealth over the lifetime in a clear way that allows quick comparisons between earning, consumption, and saving in the six countries.
Designed as a companion to Public Policies and Household Saving (1994), which addresses saving policies in the G-7 nations, this volume offers detailed descriptions of saving behavior in all G-7 nations except France.

The declining U.S. national saving rate has prompted economists and policymakers to ask, should the federal government encourage household saving, and if so, through which policies? In order to better understand saving programs, this volume provides a systematic and detailed description of saving policies in the G-7 industrialized nations: the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

Each of the seven chapters focuses on one country and addresses a core set of topics: types of accumulated household savings and debt; tax policies toward capital income; saving in the form of public and private pensions, including Social Security and similar programs; saving programs that receive special tax treatment; and saving through insurance.

This detailed summary of the saving incentives of the G-7 nations will be an invaluable reference for policymakers and academics interested in personal saving behavior.

Tax Policy and the Economy publishes current academic research findings on taxation and government spending that have both immediate bearing on policy debates and longer-term interest. The articles in Volume 23 address a range of topics, including Social Security, understanding corporate tax losses, the influence of globalization on the design of a tax system, and the question of whether federal provision of goods and services crowds out their provision by lower levels of government or the private sector.