Julie Berry Cullen of University of California, San Diego reviews, “Taxes in America: What Everyone Needs to Know” by Leonard E. Burman and Joel Slemrod. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Explores how the U.S. tax system works, how it affects people and businesses, and how it might be made better. Discusses the basics of taxes; personal income taxes; business income taxes; taxing spending; other kinds of taxes; taxes and the economy; the hidden welfare state; the burden of taxation; tax administration and enforcement; misperceptions and reality in the policy process; tax myths; and tax reform. Burman is Daniel Patrick Moynihan Professor of Public Affairs in the Maxwell School and is with the Departments of Public Administration and Economics and the Law School at Syracuse University. Slemrod is Paul W. McCracken Collegiate Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy in the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, Director of the Office of Tax Policy Research in the Ross School of Business, and Professor and Chair in the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan.”

This paper analyzes the link between rising city crime rates and urban flight. Each additional reported crime is associated with a roughly one-person decline in city population. Almost all of the crime-related population decline is attributable to increased out-migration rather than a decrease in new arrivals. Households that leave the city because of crime are much more likely to remain within the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) than those that leave the city for other reasons. Migration decisions of highly educated households and those with children are particularly responsive to changes in crime. Causality appears to run from rising crime rates to city depopulation.

Previous research on unemployment insurance (UI) has emphasized the program's effect on individual search behavior. This state‐contingent income may also reduce the labor supply of family members during the unemployment spell. We investigate this question within the context of wives' labor supply responses to their husbands' unemployment spells. We find strong “crowdout” of this form of family self‐insurance; our estimates imply that for each dollar of UI receipt wives earn up to 73 cents less. The reduction in spousal hours of work is over 40% as large as previous estimates of the effect of UI on search time of husbands.

School choice has become an increasingly prominent strategy for enhancing academic achievement. To evaluate the impact on participants, we exploit randomized lotteries that determine high school admission in the Chicago Public Schools. Compared to those students who lose lotteries, students who win attend high schools that are better in a number of dimensions, including peer achievement and attainment levels. Nonetheless, we find little evidence that winning a lottery provides any systematic benefit across a wide variety of traditional academic measures. Lottery winners do, however, experience improvements on a subset of nontraditional outcome measures, such as self-reported disciplinary incidents and arrest rates.