Alan Peters, Peter Fisher and Rick Funderburg, at the University of Iowa, and Tim Bartik, at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, have won an National Science Foundation grant for their proposal, The Impact of State and Local Taxes on Growth: Using Improved Tax Measures.

This will be a meta-econometric study. The idea is to replicate earlier econometric studies of the impact of taxes on growth, but to use better measures of taxes and to use a standardized set of econometric techniques. The project should indicate the extent to which earlier results (often used to justify changes to tax policy) stand up to scrutiny. Taxes will be measured using a new and improved version of Peter Fisher’s and Alan Peters’ micro-simulation model, TAIM.