Distributional Effects of Adopting a National Retail Sales Tax

Daniel Feenberg (), Andrew W. Mitrusi and James Poterba

No 5885, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper describes a new household-level data file based on merged information from the IRS Individual Tax File, the Current Population Survey, the National Medical Expenditure Survey, and the Consumer Expenditure Survey. This new file includes descriptive data on household income as well as consumption. The data file can be linked to the NBER TAXSIM program and used to evaluate the distributional effects of changing the federal income tax code, as well as the distributional effects of replacing the individual income tax with a consumption tax. We use this data file to analyze the long-run distributional effects of adopting a national retail sales tax that raises enough revenue to replace the current federal individual income tax and corporation income tax, as well as federal estate and gift taxes. Our results highlight the sensitivity of the change in distributional burdens to provisions such as lump sum transfers, sometimes called 'demogrants,' the retail sales tax plan, and to the choice between income and consumption as a basis for categorizing households in distribution tables.

JEL-codes: H22 H23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997-01
Note: PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Published as Distributional Effects of Adopting a National Retail Sales Tax , Daniel R. Feenberg, Andrew W. Mitrusi, James M. Poterba. in Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 11 , Poterba. 1997

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w5885.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Distributional Effects of Adopting a National Retail Sales Tax (1997)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:5885

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w5885

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().