Tax Deductions & Interstate Migration

Abstract

In December of 2017, President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017(TCJA). While the law made several changes to the tax code, one major change was instituting a cap on the amount of state and local tax (SALT) deductions a filer can claim. The SALT cap limits a tax filer’s ability to limit the impacts of state and local taxes on their overall tax burden. This new inability to soften the impact of state and local taxes could cause residents to view states with higher taxes as less attractive. The results presented in this paper showed a state’s top income tax rate and a state’s representative tax burden had a statistically significant negative effect on the probability of a household living in a new state after the SALT cap was implemented. This effect was statistically different than the negative impact of the tax measure before the passing. Suggesting, for households of varying income levels, if a state were to increase the top income tax rate by 10 percentage points the probability of a household moving to that state would decrease, on the low end 0.17 percentage points and on the high end 0.52 percentage points more than if the SALT cap was not in place. Larger impacts were found for the representative tax burden measure, where for a 10% increase in the state tax burden the probability of a household moving to the state would fall by 0.57 percentage points on the low end and 0.87 percentage points on the high end.