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Working Paper
Salience and taxation: theory and evidence
This paper presents evidence that consumers underreact to taxes that are not salient and characterizes the welfare consequences of tax policies when agents make such optimization errors. The empirical evidence is based on two complementary strategies. First, we conducted an experiment at a grocery store posting tax inclusive prices for 750 products subject to sales tax for a three week period. Scanner data show that this intervention reduced demand for the treated products by 8 percent. Second, we find that state-level increases in excise taxes (which are included in posted prices) reduce ...
Report
Consumption, Savings, and Earnings Responses to Financial Windfalls
We estimate the causal effects of a financial windfall on consumption, savings, and wage earnings using linked administrative data on a large sample of Canadian lottery winners. Using separate linkages of lottery winners to income tax records and credit bureau data, we estimate how lottery winnings affect consumption measured through credit card spending, savings through financial asset accumulation and debt repayment, and wage earnings from tax records. We then examine how these responses vary across the income distribution. We find that high-income individuals allocated a larger share of ...