中文摘要
包括我们自身研究在内，公共经济学的实证研究常常将州和地方税收的变动作为估计因果关系的实证实验场。一个关键担忧是，其他税种可能同时发生变化。为评估这一担忧，我们构建了一个数据集，涵盖州级（1977—2022年）和地方级（2000—2022年）个人所得税、企业所得税、财产税、销售税和消费税的税率与收入。这一新数据集产生了两个关键结果。第一，我们发现同一辖区内不同类型的税收往往会同向变动：一种税收发生变化，可能使同年第二种税收发生变化的可能性增加一倍以上。地方税收变动也与其所在州实施的税收变动同向变化。这种正相关会使弹性估计产生向上偏误，但幅度仅为中等。例如，将州经济结果对全部州税收变动进行回归，所得弹性比仅使用单一税种时得到的弹性约小10%—30%。第二，我们发现，州和地方辖区之间的税收构成差异很大，且随着各辖区日益依赖于其在样本最早期最为突出的单一税种——销售税、个人所得税或企业所得税——这些差异随时间推移变得更加明显。
Abstract
Empirical research in public economics, including our own, often uses variation in state and local taxes as an empirical laboratory to estimate causal relationships. A key concern is that other taxes might change at the same time. To assess this concern, we develop a dataset of state (1977–2022) and local (2000–2022) tax rates and revenue from personal income, corporate income, property, sales, and excise taxes. This new dataset generates two key results. First, we find that taxes of different types tend to co-move within a jurisdiction: a tax change of one type can more than double the likelihood of a second tax type changing in the same year. Local tax changes also co-move with tax changes enacted by the state they are located in. This positive correlation can upwardly bias elasticity estimates, but only moderately. For example, regressing state economic outcomes on the full set of state tax changes yields elasticities that are about 10%–30% smaller than those obtained from using a single tax type in isolation. Second, we document that the mix of taxes across state and local jurisdictions is very different, and that these differences have become more pronounced over time as jurisdictions have increasingly become reliant on the single tax type — sales, personal or corporate income tax — that was most prominent for them in the earliest part of our sample.