The Journal of Public & Nonprofit Affairs announced at the Midwest Public Affairs Conference that the winner of Best Paper in JPNA for last year was “Research on the Effects of Limitations on Taxes and Expenditures” by Judith Stallmann (UM – Truman), Craig Maher (UNO – SPA), Steven Deller (UW-Madison), and Sungho Park* (UNO – SPA).

The paper is a history and literature review on Tax-Expenditure Limits in the United States. If you were asked to nominate a team of authors to write such a survey, you could hardly do better than this group. In addition to publishing often on the effects of TELs, Stallmann et al. have made it something of a career mission to produce ever improved measures of how stringent TELs actually are on governments so that researchers can do something other than dummy variables. This is an incredibly difficult task, as the authors lay out in extended detail. Consequently, they generally recommend readers take a caveat emptor approach to reading studies on the effects of TELs on a variety of government behavior.

The paper should very quickly become the go-to citation for authors of TEL research in order to get up to speed on the history and literature of TEL effects. For a related paper on competing theories for why voters may seek to constrain themselves through TELs, I would recommend Vigdor’s (2004) “Other People’s Taxes” in JLE.

*Sungho Park’s CV lists May 2018 for expected dissertation defense date with seven published peer reviewed articles in English journals since 2016.

I think it is fair to say that the Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice is a relatively unknown journal. The journal represented the efforts of its founding editor, Domenico da Empoli, to continue ensuring an outlet for those who pursued the study of public finance in the Italian tradition that came to be of such prominence in the late 19th and early 20th century (Puviani [1903] is still probably the go-to citation for history of thought in fiscal illusion research) and carried on by the likes of Jim Buchanan and Richard Wagner. If you haven’t already, you should read about the Italian tradition and its contrast with Walrasian/Pareto/Musgrave public finance in Wagner’s Fiscal Sociology and the Theory of Public Finance.

If you peruse old issues of the JPFPC you will see many familiar and well-known names that suggested it commanded some serious consideration and attention, but at some point the journal became somewhat erratic in its publication frequency and had a rather out-dated submission process for authors. In 2008, as a new assistant professor, I decided to send a paper written just prior to my dissertation that was on the subject of lobbying in state capitals. I had to physically mail two copies to the editorial office in Italy (in 2008!), and then received no notifications about its receipt or standing at any point over the next two years. In 2010, I got an email where I was told to expect to receive three copies of the journal issue the paper was printed in, and the journal itself was printed as part of the 2009 volume.

Well, it appears the journal is undergoing a relaunch with new caretakers, a new publisher, and a contemporary submission process. The editorial board includes the likes of Barry Weingast, James Alm, Richard Wagner, and John Wallis, among many others. Wagner has written an essay about the journal and its efforts to extend the Italian Tradition of Public Finance. Here is an excerpt from Wagner’s essay:

Like de Viti, Buchanan wanted to treat public finance as a field of scientific study and not as an administrative tool of practical statecraft. While these orientations are antipodal, they are not contradictory. It is possible for a theorist to pursue both orientations if he or she chooses to do so, only not at the same instant. An explanatory theory of public finance has as its object the explanation of fiscal phenomena as these emerge through interaction among interested persons, with those interactions occurring within some governing institutional framework. It seeks to explain the transnational logic that undergirds observed budgetary patterns.

Check out the JPFPC’s website here.

John Mikesell (Indiana University – SPEA) has a new paper on state revenue forecasting in Public Administration Review with “Often Wrong, Never Uncertain: Lessons from 40 Years of State Revenue Forecasting.” In the paper, Mikesell offers nine “lessons” (albeit I would describe them as “insights”) about state revenue forecasting that are derived from his time on the Indiana Revenue Forecasting Committee. As with all Mikesell papers the footnotes are “must reads.” Here is the abstract:

Experience in state revenue forecasting humbles and educates the public finance scholar and can inform the public administrator. It teaches the limits of econometrics, the importance of disaggregation, the significance of tax administrators, the utility of causal models, the issue of data problems, the need to understand tax structure, the importance of consensus forecasts, the terror of recessions, and the reality of being wrong. In the Indiana consensus system, experience provides greater respect for public servants seeking to make a sustainable fiscal system function and probably contributes to making the revenue forecast binding in the budget process.

From the May 2018 NBER series is “Taxes and Growth: New Narrative Evidence from Interwar Britain” by James Cloyne, Nicholas Dimsdale, Natacha Postel-Vinay.

This is part of something of a renaissance of historical research in economics, where careful historical work is used with an eye towards discovering clever identification strategies for causal estimation. It is always impressive when historical events can be used to learn something still relevant for contemporary policy (fiscal multipliers in this case), a task that is not as easy as it sounds. Unlike research on contemporary policy, it also possibly adds the advantage of offering a sense of detachment that can be harder to overcome when dealing with living political actors and stakeholders.  Here is the abstract:

 

See it here.

Research Articles:

“Raising the Stakes: Experimental Evidence on the Endogeneity of Taxpayer Mistakes.”  By Naomi Feldman, Jacob Goldin, and Tatiana Homonoff

“The Effect of Flat Tax Rates on Taxable Income: Evidence from the Illinois Rate Increase.” By Thomas Luke Spreen

“Perceptions and Realities of Average Tax Rates in the Federal Income Tax: Evidence from Michigan.” By Charles L. Ballard and Sanjay Gupta

“Assessing the Tax Benefits of Hybrid Arrangements — Evidence from the Luxembourg Leaks.” By Inga Hardeck and Patrick U. Wittenstein

“More Than They Realize: The Income of the Wealthy.” By Jenny Bourne, Eugene Steuerle, Brian Raub, Joseph Newcomb, and Ellen Steele.

Reflections of the Holland Medal Recipient:

“Perils of Tax Reform.” By James R. Hines, Jr.

Forum: Framing the Tax Base in Policy Discussions

“Is the Haig-Simons Standard Dead? The Uneasy Case for a Comprehensive Income Tax” By Jim Alm

“Too Clever by Half: The Politics and Optics of the Two-Part VAT.” By Alan D. Viard.