Tax Policy and the Economy

About Tax Policy and the Economy

Tax Policy and the Economy — An NBER Annual Volume on Taxation and Government Spending

Tax Policy and the Economy is an annual scholarly volume sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and published by the University of Chicago Press. It is catalogued with ISSN 0892-8649 and electronic ISSN 1537-2650, the identifiers carried in the Journals World record. It began with Volume 1 in 1987 and has continued as a yearly collection of research papers: recent volumes listed by the publisher include Volume 38, Volume 39 in 2025 edited by Robert A. Moffitt, and Volume 40 for 2026. Calling it simply a “journal” understates its distinctive form. It is best understood as a peer-edited annual research series — part journal, part conference volume — in which a small set of substantial papers on taxation and government spending is commissioned, discussed within the NBER research community, and published together each year.

That form explains both its influence and its limits for authors. Most economists cannot submit an unsolicited manuscript to Tax Policy and the Economy in the way they would to a quarterly journal. Papers are typically written by NBER research associates and affiliated scholars working on taxation and public expenditure, presented and discussed before publication, and gathered by the volume editor. For readers, students, policy analysts and other researchers, however, the series is one of the most reliable yearly windows onto current academic thinking about the United States tax and transfer system and, increasingly, about tax systems in other countries as points of comparison and evidence.

At a Glance

Two cautions belong at the top of any profile of this title. First, its editor and volume contents change over a long history: James M. Poterba edited many earlier volumes — Volume 19, for example, lists Poterba as editor — while recent volumes list Robert A. Moffitt. Attributing every volume to a single editor would be wrong. Second, its papers speak primarily to policy debates in the United States, because the Internal Revenue Code, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit supply most of its institutional material. International papers appear when they illuminate design questions — value-added tax administration in China and the taxation of multinational profit shifting are recent examples — but this is not a general international tax law review.

Mission: Research With Immediate Bearing and Longer-Term Interest

The publisher describes the series, in paraphrase, as publishing current academic research on taxation and government spending that has both immediate bearing on policy debates and longer-term interest. That double test shapes every volume. A paper that is technically elegant but answers no question a policymaker, budget analyst or fellow researcher is asking will not fit. A topical comment that will date within a news cycle will not fit either. The papers that belong here use economic theory and careful empirical evidence to answer durable questions: Who bears a tax? How do people and firms change behaviour when rates, bases or credits change? What does a programme cost, whom does it reach, and what happens at its margins and thresholds?

The publisher also notes, in its description of earlier volumes, that papers provide background for policy analysts in government and the private sector without making specific policy recommendations. That restraint is a hallmark of the NBER style. A Tax Policy and the Economy paper will usually estimate an elasticity, measure an incidence pattern, document avoidance or evasion, or compare design options and their trade-offs — and then stop short of telling Congress what to enact. Readers who want advocacy should look elsewhere; readers who want evidence they can use in their own analysis will find the restraint valuable, because it makes the findings usable across political positions.

History: From Volume 1 in 1987 to the Present

Volume 1, published in 1987, set the template. Its contents, listed on the University of Chicago Press journals site, opened with a study by Alan J. Auerbach and James M. Poterba asking why corporate tax revenues had declined, followed by papers on share repurchases and non-dividend cash payments, on amnesty and enforcement, on the 1983 increase in the federal cigarette excise tax, on whether the estate tax raises revenue, and on Social Security and the American family. In a single volume, the enduring agenda was already visible: corporate taxation, enforcement, excise taxes, wealth transfer taxes and social insurance — each treated empirically, each tied to a live debate of the 1980s that has never really closed.

Across the following decades the series tracked the changing frontier of public economics. Volumes in the 1990s and 2000s addressed tax reform after the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the growth of the Earned Income Tax Credit, state and local taxation, environmental taxation, pension and retirement saving incentives, and the taxation of multinational corporations as globalisation deepened. The financial crisis and the Affordable Care Act brought papers on health insurance, Medicaid and Medicare design, disability and transfers. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 generated a wave of studies — on corporate behaviour and firms' public statements about the Act, on itemised deductions, on pass-through business income and on international profit shifting — that runs through recent volumes.

Recent volumes show the current agenda clearly. Volume 38 included work on Earned Income Tax Credit disallowance after audits, on racial differences in the marriage penalty or bonus in the income tax, on how computerising value-added tax transactions in China affected revenue from large manufacturing firms, on foreign bank account reporting and tax compliance, on charitable giving within an optimal income tax framework, and on carbon taxes compared with caps or quantity targets for emissions. Volume 39, as summarised by the publisher, included work on the itemised medical deduction and its distribution across income groups after 2017, on the federal budget deficit and the debt-to-gross-domestic-product ratio, on incorporating evidence about research and development investment into federal budget projections, on profit shifting by United States multinational corporations and measurement error in foreign earnings data, and on California's Earned Income Tax Credit and its differing employment effects. Volume 40, listed for 2026, continues the series into analysis of the major 2025 federal tax legislation and its budgetary effects.

That continuity is the point. A library holding a run of Tax Policy and the Economy holds a yearly, edited record of what leading public economists thought was most worth measuring about taxes and spending, year by year, for nearly four decades. Few annual series sustain that record without interruption.

What the Papers Look Like

A typical volume contains about five or six papers, each a full research study rather than a short note. Papers commonly combine an institutional explanation written for non-specialist economists, a theoretical or conceptual frame, an empirical strategy using tax return data, survey data, administrative records or a model such as NBER's TAXSIM calculator of federal and state income tax liability, and a discussion of revenue, distributional and behavioural implications. References to the Congressional Budget Office, the Joint Committee on Taxation and agency administrative data are frequent, because the questions are often about magnitudes that budget offices must estimate.

Recurring themes can be grouped for a reader deciding where to start.

• Income taxation of households: marginal tax rates across the life cycle and across income levels, the cumulative rates created when taxes and transfers interact for low-income families, marriage penalties and bonuses, filing costs and simplification, and taxpayer perceptions and biases about incentives.
• Tax credits and transfers: the Earned Income Tax Credit and its employment effects, child-related credits, education credits, disability programmes, unemployment insurance design and experience rating, and the interaction of transfers with labour supply.
• Social insurance: Social Security benefit timing, claiming ages and implicit fiscal debts; Medicare and Medicaid financing, means testing, block grant designs and provider reimbursement; and health reform effects on coverage and employment for older workers.
• Business and corporate taxation: corporate revenue trends, business income taxation since the 1950s, pass-through entities, depreciation and investment incentives, charitable vehicles such as donor-advised funds, and firms' responses to major reforms.
• International taxation and compliance: profit shifting, tax havens, foreign account disclosure, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, a possible global minimum tax, and administrative technology such as computerised value-added tax systems.
• Environmental and excise taxation: gasoline taxes and their political economy, carbon taxes versus quantity targets, transportation user charges and vehicle-miles-travelled charges, and cigarette and other excise taxes.
• Fiscal outlook: deficits, debt dynamics, the growth dividend in debt ratios, valuation of implicit fiscal liabilities, and the budgetary treatment of research investment and other long-horizon spending.

Readers should notice what is largely absent: doctrinal tax law analysis, accounting practice guidance, personal finance advice and state-by-state compliance detail. The series is economics. A lawyer or accountant will find evidence here about how rules change behaviour, but not a commentary on the rules themselves.

Editorial Model and How Work Reaches the Volume

The journal site names Robert A. Moffitt as editor and identifies NBER as sponsor. NBER is a private, non-profit research organisation whose model is built around research associates, working groups and conferences rather than around a conventional journal editorial office. Papers in an NBER series volume typically originate in that network: scholars working in the relevant programme develop a paper, circulate it — often first as an NBER working paper — present it for discussion, revise it, and see it published in the annual volume by the University of Chicago Press. Many individual papers are therefore also discoverable as NBER working papers, sometimes in earlier form.

For an outside author, the honest guidance is this: do not treat Tax Policy and the Economy as an open-submission journal and do not send an unsolicited manuscript expecting ordinary peer review. Scholars who wish their work to be considered for the NBER tax research community should build the relevant scholarly record — publish in peer-reviewed public economics journals, circulate working papers, present at the conferences where this community gathers — and follow the current information on the NBER and University of Chicago Press sites for any call or invitation route that may be stated there. Where a submission route is not publicly disclosed on those official sites, this profile says so plainly rather than inventing one.

For citing authors, the practical point is different: cite the published volume version where possible, with its volume number and year, because that is the version of record distributed by the University of Chicago Press in both its journals platform and its book programme. The journals site organises content by volume back to Volume 1 in 1987, and the Press also lists the title as a book series that can be purchased as a standing order, a detail that helps librarians explain why the same content may be shelved or catalogued in either form.

Metrics and Standing in Public Economics

The Journals World record carries an H-index of 20 and an SJR of 1.087 for this title, categorised Q1 in that record. Such figures need context for an annual volume. A title that publishes only five or six papers a year accumulates citations differently from a quarterly journal publishing a hundred articles a year; its H-index will look modest beside large journals even when individual papers are heavily cited and widely taught. SJR, which weights citations by the prestige of the citing source, better reflects the series' position: its papers are cited in leading economics journals, in budget and policy analysis, and in graduate teaching, because the authors are often the researchers who define their subfields.

Standing, in this case, is best judged by authorship and use rather than by a single ranking number. Contributors across the volumes include Alan J. Auerbach, James M. Poterba, Emmanuel Saez, Wojciech Kopczuk, Joel Slemrod, Caroline Hoxby, Raj Chetty's collaborators in the broader NBER network and many other leading public economists — a roster a reader can verify from the tables of contents on the publisher site. Government analysts cite the series because its estimates are produced independently of the agencies whose budgets they inform. Instructors assign its papers because each one explains its institution before it models it, making the work teachable to students who know economics but not yet the tax code.

Quartile labels remain year- and category-specific. A reader who needs a current quartile for an evaluation should check SCImago or Scopus for the present year and the economics category, rather than relying on any static profile, including this one.

Who Should Read It, and How

Graduate students in public economics will get the most from reading one volume whole. Five or six papers read together show how the same toolkit — incidence analysis, elasticity estimation, optimal tax reasoning, programme evaluation — is applied across households, firms, social insurance and the environment. Reading a run of volumes in sequence then shows how questions evolve as legislation and data change.

Policy analysts in legislatures, finance ministries, budget offices and research organisations should treat each volume as a briefing book with a longer shelf life than a briefing memo. The papers deliberately avoid specific recommendations, which makes them safe to use across administrations and parties: the evidence on, for example, how audit disallowance affects later credit claiming, or how retiring at different ages changes lifetime Social Security benefits after tax, remains relevant whichever policy conclusion a reader draws from it.

Journalists and general readers with some economics background will find the introductions and institutional sections accessible, even where the econometrics that follow are demanding. The volume introductions by the editor, and the publisher's volume summaries, provide a reliable plain-language map of each paper's question and headline finding, and are a legitimate way in before tackling a full paper.

Librarians should note the dual identity. The title sits in the University of Chicago Press journals programme — the Press groups it in an NBER package with the NBER Macroeconomics Annual and related annuals in its combination rates — and simultaneously as a numbered book series. Checking both the journals platform holdings and the book series holdings avoids the common error of a gap created by cataloguing the same volume in only one place.

Strengths, Limits and Cautions

Strengths include editorial continuity over nearly four decades, authorship drawn from the centre of the public economics research community, a disciplined focus on taxation and spending rather than economics in general, independence from government, and dual distribution that keeps back volumes obtainable in print and online. The series' insistence on evidence without advocacy has preserved its credibility across very different tax policy eras.

Limits are equally clear. Publication is annual and selective, so the series cannot be a rapid-response outlet; a paper on a new law may appear a year or more after enactment, in considered rather than instant form. The United States focus means readers seeking systematic coverage of European, Asian or African tax systems must supplement it with other sources. The closed, network-based commissioning model means most researchers will be readers and citers of the series rather than contributors. And because each volume is also sold as a book, prices, package inclusions and platform access can differ between institutions; current terms are not publicly disclosed in a single stable figure and should be checked with the University of Chicago Press at the time of ordering.

No conflict was found between the Journals World record and official sources on the core identity facts: title, sponsor, publisher, country and ISSN pair all align. The main correction this profile offers to a casual reading of the record is one of type: this is an annual NBER research volume published by a university press, and it should be evaluated — and used — as that, not as a conventional quarterly journal.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Tax Policy and the Economy a journal or a book series? Both in distribution, one in substance: an annual, edited volume of research papers, listed by the University of Chicago Press in its journals programme and sold as a book series that libraries can take on standing order.

Who publishes and sponsors it? The National Bureau of Economic Research sponsors it; the University of Chicago Press publishes it. The journal site names Robert A. Moffitt as editor.

When did it start? Volume 1 appeared in 1987. Volume 39 is listed for 2025 and Volume 40 for 2026.

Can I submit a paper? It is not an open-submission journal in the ordinary sense. Papers originate mainly in the NBER research network. Check the NBER and publisher sites for any current stated route, and build toward the community through the field's peer-reviewed journals and conferences.

Does it make policy recommendations? Its stated approach is to present research and background for analysts without making specific policy recommendations. Readers draw their own conclusions from the evidence.

Profile compiled from official NBER and University of Chicago Press sources for Journals World. Verify time-sensitive details — editor, forthcoming volume contents and access terms — on the publisher's live pages.