Mentor/s
Dr. Khawaja Mamun
Participation Type
Poster
Abstract
Fiscal policy in the United States is impacted by a multitude of factors such as macroeconomic and political factors. In this regard, we explore an overlooked factor that has a major impact on fiscal policy, namely the legislative turnover. In particular, we study the overall impact that state legislative turnover has on federal and state cigarette taxation from 1980-2016. Theoretically, a state with lower turnover of the legislator will influence the cigarette taxation. Lower turnover and thus long tenure may lower the intensity of lobbying thus raise taxes. This result is similar to the evidence found in political competition literature (Besley, Persson and Sturm, 2010) where lower competition leads to higher taxes. We have to address the methodological issue if turnover may be endogenous as voters are likely to re-elect state legislators who adopt favorable fiscal policies. We adopt the quasi-experimental variation in turnover generated by state term limit provisions used by Uppal and Glazer (2015) to address this potential endogeneity issue.
College and Major available
Business Economics, Finance
Location
University Commons
Start Day/Time
4-20-2018 1:00 PM
End Day/Time
4-20-2018 3:00 PM
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Prize Categories
Most Scholarly Impact or Potential, Best Visuals, Most Meaningful
State Legislative Term Limits Impact on Cigarette Taxation
University Commons
Fiscal policy in the United States is impacted by a multitude of factors such as macroeconomic and political factors. In this regard, we explore an overlooked factor that has a major impact on fiscal policy, namely the legislative turnover. In particular, we study the overall impact that state legislative turnover has on federal and state cigarette taxation from 1980-2016. Theoretically, a state with lower turnover of the legislator will influence the cigarette taxation. Lower turnover and thus long tenure may lower the intensity of lobbying thus raise taxes. This result is similar to the evidence found in political competition literature (Besley, Persson and Sturm, 2010) where lower competition leads to higher taxes. We have to address the methodological issue if turnover may be endogenous as voters are likely to re-elect state legislators who adopt favorable fiscal policies. We adopt the quasi-experimental variation in turnover generated by state term limit provisions used by Uppal and Glazer (2015) to address this potential endogeneity issue.
Students' Information
Honorable mention in the 2018 Academic Festival award category Welch College of Business Dean's Prize.