The sentence immediately prior to the Reagan reference: > The new paper ... examines 18 developed countries — from Australia to the United States — over a 50-y

The sentence immediately prior to the Reagan reference: > The new paper ... examines 18 developed countries — from Australia to the United States — over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015. And from the original paper[0]: > Many empirical studies look at single tax policy indicators to identify tax cuts for the rich. However, there is some disagreement on measuring taxes on the rich in the literature. First, there is no consensus on which taxes to look at. Whilst some authors look at taxes on personal income (Egger et al., 2019; Rubolino and Waldenström, 2020), others focus on corporate taxation (Devereux et al., 2002) or inheritance taxation (Piketty and Saez, 2013b). Second, economists have used different tax policy indicators. Some look at top marginal income tax rates (Piketty et al., 2014), while others look at effective tax rates (Egger et al., 2019) or revenue generation (Baunsgaard and Keen, 2010). We propose an encompassing approach that utilises Bayesian latent variable analysis on a range of different taxes and indicators to overcome these problems. This allows us to detect shared variance across 7 indicators that are commonly used proxies for taxes on the rich (see Table A1 in the Appendix). In total, the data cover 18 OECD democracies over 5 decades (1965-2015). We estimate the latent variable using a Bayesian Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach with diffuse normal priors, three MCMC chains and 1000 burnin iterations (for more information on the estimation of the latent variable, see Hope and Limberg, 2020). It's likely that professionals have a better grasp of the nuances of empirical tax research than you or I. [0] http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/107919/1/Hope_economic_consequences_of_major_tax_cuts_published.pdf http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/107919/1/Hope_economic_consequences...