ALISA TAZHITDINOVA

​​Associate Professor of Economics at UC Santa Barbara 
Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research
Principal Investigator at the UCSB Public Finance Lab

CV

​​Contact Information:
​Department of Economics, UCSB
2127 North Hall, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9210
​Email: tazhitda [at] ucsb.edu

​How to pronounce my last name? "tah-zheet-DEE-noh-vah," where "zh" is pronounced as "s" in "leisure"

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​WORKING PAPERS:

 ​"Do Taxes Affect Pre-Tax Income Inequality?" (with Sarah Robinson and  Matías Strehl Pessina) 

"Are U.S. State Tax Policies Increasingly Polarized? "  ​(with Sarah Robinson)​   
​
"Understanding Capital Gains Responses to Taxes using Transaction-Level Data"  (with Sreeraahul Kancherla)

​"Difference-in-Differences  with Unequal Baseline Treatment Status"  (with Gonzalo Vazquez-Bare)
 NBER Working Paper 31063

"What Drives Tax Policy? Political, Institutional and Economic Determinants of State Tax Policy" 
​(with Sarah Robinson)​   NBER Working Paper 31268
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​​​"Adverse Selection and Moral Hazard in Social Insurance for Entrepreneurs" (with Youssef Benzarti, Jarkko Harju, Tuomas Matikka and Ella Mattinen)

PUBLICATIONS:

"One Hundred Years of U.S. State Taxation"  ​(with Sarah Robinson)​  
Journal of Public Economics, 2025 volume 241, 105273.  Publisher's Link    Data
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"Permanent and Transitory Responses to Capital Gains Taxes: Evidence from a Lifetime Exemption in Canada" 
 (with Adam Lavecchia)​  Review of Economics and Statistics, 2024.    Publisher's Link      NBER Working Paper 28514     
Non-technical summary      Slides    Featured in: Globe and Mail 1, Globe and Mail 2
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​"Corporate Political Spending and State Tax Policy: Evidence from Citizens United" (with Cailin Slattery and  Sarah Robinson)​,  Journal of Public Economics,  2023 volume 221 (May), 104859.    Publisher's Link    NBER Working Paper 30352         
Featured in: Wall Street Journal,  Harvard Law School Forum,  CATO Brief

​"Increasing Hours Worked: Moonlighting Responses to a Large Tax Reform," 
​American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2022, 14(1): 473-500.  Publisher's Link    NBER Working Paper 27726

​"Do Value-Added Taxes Affect International Trade Flows? Evidence from 30 Years of Tax Reforms" ​(with Youssef Benzarti), American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2021, 13(4): 469-489. Publisher's Link   NBER Working Paper 26195      
Featured in: Future Directions (Australia)
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​​"Are Changes of Organizational Form Costly? Income Shifting and Business Entry Responses to Taxes," 
​Journal of Public Economics, 2020, volume 186 (June), 104187.    Publisher's Link    Slides

​"Do Only Tax Incentives Matter? Labor Supply and Demand Responses to an Unusually Large and Salient Tax Break" Journal of Public Economics, 2020, volume 184 (April), 104162.  Publisher's Link   
Winner of the 2016 IIPF Peggy and Richard Musgrave Price 
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​​"Reducing Evasion Through Self-Reporting: Evidence from Charitable Contributions"  
 Journal of Public Economics, 2018, volume 165 (September), pp. 31-47.    Publisher's Link     Slides
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