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“To Each According to His Need,” Including Opera
Taxprof reports on Miranda Fleischer's latest: Miranda Perry Fleischer (San Diego), How is the Opera Like a Soup Kitchen?, in The Philosophical Foundations of Tax Law (Oxford University Press, 2016):The charitable tax subsidies are, at heart, redistributive. Some individuals
The Cost to Harvard Law School of Repudiating the Royall Bequest
Some students at Harvard Law School want to eliminate the Royall crest from its seal on account of donor Royall’s slaveowning. Presumably this means they want to repudiate the Royall gift. How much money would that cost the Law
The Value of Skadden’s Tax Opinion Letter in the Yahoo Alibaba Spinoff Deal
Professor Victor Fleischer's just written Yahoo’s Spinoff Plan Could Be Risky Business for the New York Times. Yahoo is thinking of spinning off its stock in Alibaba as a separate entity, but this could result in huge taxes on the
Zuckerberg’s use of an LLC for giving away his fortune–what good is it?
Mark Zuckerberg has announced he is setting up an LLC as a way to give away 99% of his fortune, which consists mainly of Facebook stock. I was puzzled by this at first, because doing it this way has no
Buonanno & Vanin: Social Cohesion Lowers Some Crime, Increases Tax Avoidance
“Social Closure, Surnames and Crime” Quaderni – Working Paper DSE N° 1032
PAOLO BUONANNO, University of Bergamo – Department of EconomicsPAOLO VANIN, University of Bologna – Department of EconomicsThis paper studies the effect of social closure on crime and
Anderson et al. on Traffic and Happiness
“Superstitions, Street Traffic, and Subjective Well-Being” NBER Working Paper No. w21551
MICHAEL L. ANDERSON, U.C. Berkeley – Department of Agricultural and Resource EconomicsFANGWEN LU, University of California, Berkeley; YIRAN ZHANG, Renmin University of ChinaJUN YANG, Beijing Transportation
Lawyers Bite Apple, Declare It’s an Orange
Bar scores for new lawyers dropped last year. This lead the administrators of the nationwide portion of the state tests to declare that us law professors were either admitting weaker students, or failing to prepare them adequately (too much "practice
Who Wants the Fed to Raise Rates?
The Fed left interest rates alone, and not everyone is happy about that. As Matt Yglesias argues, leaving rates low indefinitely is at least defensible, as long as inflation stays as low as it is (fuel prices are creating
Manns on Rating the Rating Agencies
“The Reciprocal Oversight Problem” Iowa Law Review, Forthcoming
JEFFREY MANNS, George Washington University Law SchoolSovereign ratings are designed to mitigate investors’ risk exposure by highlighting the fiscal condition of governments. The problem is that sovereign ratings entail reciprocal oversight