New Estimates of the Incidence of the Payroll Tax

The purpose of this study is to take a somewhat different look at the issue of the shifting of the payroll tax for Social Security (OASDHI) than has been done in the previous literature. The novel aspects are: 1) We concentrate only on the degree to which workers' earnings are affected by the share of the tax paid by employers; 2) We base the study on data describing the behavior of individuals rather than the more aggregated units (industries or entire economies) that have been used in other studies;' 3) Finally, the nature of our data allows us to study the dynamics of the process of tax shifting and thus discover how rapidly, as well as how much of, any payroll tax increase is shifted back onto workers.