Do Taxes Matter? Lessons From the 1980s
评估1981和1986年两次税改的经济影响，发现实际反应远小于供给侧革命者的预期，指出税收不仅改变相对价格，还影响收入报告、金融重组等行为，需从交易视角理解税收效应。
The response of the economy to two major -- although in important respects offsetting -- tax reforms has been much smaller than ardent supply-side revolutionaries expected, thus suggesting that a reassessment of the grounds for revolt is in order. This paper offers such a reassessment by first discussing how the evidence from the tax reforms of 1981 and 1986 reflects on our understanding of the response to taxation -- with particular reference to savings and capital gains realizations. I then reconstruct a 1992 view about how taxes affect behavior. A unifying theme is that the tax system does much more than alter the relative prices of real variables -- it also provides incentives to misreport income, restructure financial claims, time transactions, change the legal form of organization, and so on. For this reason, observed low tax elasticities of real variables may be due to either low elasticities of substitution or the fact that tax policy changes opportunity sets in complex ways. Disentangling these explanations requires an emphasis on the transaction-based nature of the tax system and the administration and enforcement of tax laws.