Recent events—the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the Occupy Wall Street
movement, and efforts to increase the minimum wage, among others—have driven a
tremendous surge of interest in the political power of business. Capital Gains collects some
of the most innovative new work in the field. The chapters explore the influence of business
on American politics in the twentieth century at the federal, state, and municipal levels. From
corporate spending on city governments in the 1920s to business support for public …

This study updates previous research estimating the persistent effect of tax changes on
capital gains realizations by using a large panel of tax returns from 1999 to 2008. Similar to
earlier studies in the literature, we use the Type II Tobit model to address the sample
selection problem and we address the endogeneity problem in the tax variables, but we
improve the identification of the tax elasticity by using an exclusion restriction: the presence
of carryover loss. The preferred persistent elasticity estimate is–0.72 and is statistically …