• Write-Off: The Tax Blog

    Why do quarters have ridges, and what does it have to do with taxes (and inflation!)

    In my class, the very first tax law I mention, on slide two of day one, is named “An Act for Granting to His Majesty Several Rates or Duties Upon Houses for Making Good the Deficiency of the Clipped Money”. It was passed in England in 1696. It is known as the window tax, and it was a tax based on the number of windows you had in your house. In class we focus on this window tax, and I rarely mention what the tax was to pay for, specifically, “making good the deficiency of the clipped money”.  What is that?
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January 31, 2021

What do we know about CbC Reporting?

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Recent News & Media

Ed Maydew Speaks About Tax Fundamentals for VC Investors in the BTEI Program

December 20, 2021

UNC Tax Center Senior Executive Director Ed Maydew recently spoke on tax fundamentals as part of the UNC Entrepreneurship Center's Black Technology Ecosystems Investors Certificate Program. More

Coming Up

5th Annual UNC Tax Center and Tax Policy Center Conference

Wednesday June 8, 2022

Join the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and the UNC Tax Center for their annual conference in Washington, D.C. More details to come. More

 

TCJA Effects Tracker

The Macroeconomic Effects of Corporate Tax Reforms

February 11, 2022

This paper extends a standard general equilibrium framework with a corporate tax code featuring two key elements: tax depreciation policy and the distinction between c-corporations and pass-through businesses. In the model, the stimulative effect of a tax rate cut on c-corporations is smaller when tax depreciation policy is accelerated, and is further diluted in the aggregate by the presence of pass-through entities. Because of a highly accelerated tax depreciation policy and a large share of pass-through activity in 2017, the theory predicts small stimulus, large payouts to shareholders, and a dramatic loss of corporate tax revenues following the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA-17). At the same time, because of less accelerated tax depreciation and a lower pass-through share in the early 1960s, the theory predicts sizable stimulus in response to the Kennedy’s corporate tax cuts. The model-implied corporate tax multiplier for Kennedy’s tax cuts is four times higher than for the TCJA-17. These predictions are consistent with novel micro- and macro-level evidence from professional forecasters and publicly available tax returns. The paper also offers analytic insights that clarify how these results relate to the capital taxation literature in macroeconomics. More