Despite their prominence in state tax portfolios, state income taxes have received much less attention in the literature on behavioral responses to taxes. Consequently, decisions are often made without the needed evidence on response elasticities. In the spirit of the growing literature on the elasticity of taxable income, which has primarily considered federal taxes using individual data, we estimate state-level panel regressions of state personal income tax bases on state tax rates, structures, and other controls. Measuring state personal income tax bases is notoriously difficult, so we compare actual data gathered directly from state revenue officials with two other proxies: tax collections divided by the top marginal tax rate and total adjusted gross income on federal returns from each state. Results generally indicate that state tax rates on wage income have no impact on the actual tax base and only a small positive effect on the calculated base, but they have a larger effect on federal AGI. This suggests that individuals could be filing federal returns from higher-tax-rate states but are not necessarily reporting the same income to those states for state tax purposes. We also find that the tax rate on capital income is positively associated with state personal income tax bases. This might be picking up tastes for public services, to the extent that more mobile higher-income taxpayers move their entire tax bases to states with more or better services (and higher tax rates). Similarly, we find that the tax rate on pension income increases actual state base data while reducing the calculated base and federal AGI. The latter results might indicate that taxpayers with pension income prefer lower-tax-rate states and bring small tax bases with them when they relocate. It is important to note that, with the exception of tax rates on pension income, we find little to no evidence that higher state tax rates reduce personal income tax bases.

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Periodical fluctuation is a common phenomenon in food safety supervision. The existing literature on China’s food safety supervision mainly analyzes periodical fluctuation by statistical methods. This paper provides a theoretical explanation by building an evolutionary game model between food enterprises and supervision institutions under bounded rationality. The “Sanlu milk powder” food safety incident is taken as a typical example to conduct numerical simulations of the food safety supervision game. Moreover, the determining factors in the periodical fluctuation in food safety supervision are analyzed in detail by numerical simulations, including the initial states and benefit–cost parameters. The results show that the periodical fluctuation and probability of supervision failure are influenced by the initial states. Supervision institutions should discard historical path dependence and adjust their supervision-intensity timing according to its actual effects. In addition, blindly increasing rewards or punishments cannot effectively restrain the fluctuation or reduce food safety incidents. To reduce the occurrence of food safety incidents and decrease periodical fluctuation, supervision institutions should reduce supervision costs by using information technology, establish strict food safety standards to eliminate “small-workshop” enterprises, be more aware of risks and appropriately overestimate the added benefits for food enterprises of becoming involved in illegal production.

The United States has a rich history of local government taxation and good provision. The last fifty years, however, have seen increasing calls for the regionalization of municipal taxes and services from policymakers. Arguments for greater regionalization emphasize improved efficiency, enhanced equity, mitigation of spillovers, and improved economic development. A number of localist scholars have responded to regionalists' concerns. This review articulates regionalists' arguments, the localists' response, and summarizes the relevant empirical literature to see which side's theories hold forth in the data.