DEEP DATA LAB

The Deep Data Lab is directed by Professor Matthew C. Harding and is part of the Economics Department at the UC-Irvine... Our group conducts theoretical and applied research at the intersection of econometrics and machine learning. We engage in partnerships with leading companies, foundations or agencies to solve challenging real world problems... While varying substantially from municipality to municipality and being remarkably complex in terms of how they are applied at the product level, local sales taxes have largely been overlooked in the economic literature. We explore sales tax complexity that comes from variance in rate of taxation as well as in the proportion of goods exempted from a given tax. To do this, we combine local sales tax data with grocery store scanner data of more than 166 million observations. We explore the relationship between tax complexity and prices, investigating whether grocery stores in areas with more complex taxes pass on the cost of compliance to..