Stinson, Barnes, Buchheit, and Morrow (2018; hereafter, SBBM) examine whether a consumer-directed tax incentive is effective at encouraging the purchase of an incentivized product. In particular they rely on an experiment to compare tax credits available to consumers to other forms of price concessions (e.g., retail price concessions). Investigating the effectiveness of a particular form of tax incentive is important because, given a desire by policymakers to incentivize the purchase of a particular product or service (e.g., environmentally friendly cars or higher education), there are a number of different ways the incentive can be designed. However, studies that investigate the effectiveness of a tax incentive by relying on archival data (e.g., tax return data) are jointly investigating both the form (e.g., consumer- or manufacturer-directed incentive) and substance (e.g., dollar amount, targeted product/service) of the incentive. By relying on an experiment, SBBM are able to disentangle these two components of...
