NBER Working Paper: Do Americans Want to Tax Capital? Evidence from Online Surveys

"Do Americans Want to Tax Capital? Evidence from Online Surveys," by Raymond Fisman, Keith Gladstone, Ilyana Kuziemko and Suresh Naidu 

Abstract:

A vast theoretical literature in public finance has studied the question of the desirability of capital taxation.  Distinct from questions of the optimality of taxing wealth is whether it is politically feasible.  We provide, to our knowledge, the firstinvestigation of individuals' preferences over jointly taxing income and wealth, via a survey on Amazon's Mechanical Turk.  We provide subjects with a set of hypothetical individuals' incomes and wealth and elicit subjects' preferred (absolute) tax bill for these individuals.  Our method allows us to unobtrusively map both income earned and accumulated wealth into desired tax levels.  Our regression results yield roughly linear desired tax rates on income of about 14 percent.  Respondents' suggested tax rates indicate positive desired wealth taxation.  When we distinguish between sources of wealth we find that, in line with recent theoretical arguments, subjects' implied tax rate on wealth is three percent when the source of wealth is inheritance, far higher than the 0.8 percent rate when wealth is from savings.  We show these tax rates are consistent with reasonable parameterizations of recent theoretical optimal wealth tax formulae.

Upon whom does an energy tax fall? Who bears the burden?

Who Bears the Economic Costs of Environmental Regulations? by Don Fullerton, Erich Muehlegger

Abstract:
Public economics has a well-developed literature on tax incidence -
the ultimate burdens from tax policy.  This literature is used here
to describe not only the distributional effects of environmental
taxes or subsidies but also the likely incidence of non-tax
regulations, energy efficiency standards, or other environmental
mandates.  Recent papers find that mandates can be more regressive
than carbon taxes.  We also describe how the distributional effects
of such policies can be altered by various market conditions such as
limited factor mobility, trade exposure, evasion, corruption, or
imperfect competition. Finally, we review data on carbon-intensity
of production and exports around the world in order to describe
implications for effects of possible carbon taxation on countries
with different levels of income per capita.
Complete working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.