Whitney Afonso is an Associate Professor at the School of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was recently awarded the Diversity Impact Award for her work on examining Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) uptake differentials in communities of color and rural communities.
Whitney is a member of the Executive Committee for the Association for Budgeting and Financial Management (ABFM). Whitney was awarded the Jesse Burkhead Award for best article published in Public Budgeting & Finance in 2015. It was for her article “Leviathan or Flypaper: Earmarked Local Sales Taxes for Transportation.”
Whitney teaches within the Carolina MPA program as well as working with local practitioners across the state of North Carolina. Her work focuses on state and local tax policy with an emphasis on local sales taxes. In that role she co-manages the Death & Taxes blog. You can also see a blog entry she wrote for the London School of Economics Public Policy blog and a policy brief for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Whitney is also an Academic Fellow at the Kenan Institute’s Tax Center.
Examples of recent work:
“The Adoption of Local Option Fuel Taxes: Evidence From Florida Counties” with Can Chen. 2021. Public Budgeting & Finance 41(1): 51-75. (Article)
“Can Employee Training Influence Local Fiscal Outcomes?” with Luke Spreen and Ed Gerrish. 2020. American Review of Public Administration 50(4): 401–414. (Article)
“The Barriers Created by Complexity: A State by State Analysis of Local Sales Tax Laws in Light of the Wayfair Ruling” 2019. National Tax Journal 72(4): 777-800. (Article)
“Ethics by Design: The Impact of Form of Government on Municipal Corruption” with Kim Nelson. 2019. Public Administration Review 79(4): 591-600. (Article)
“The Impact of the “Amazon Tax” on Local Sales Tax Revenue” 2019. Public Budgeting & Finance 39(2): 68-90. (Article)
“The Effect of Connecticut’s Income Tax Adoption on Migration.” 2018. Journal of Public Policy 38(1):113-140. (Article)
“The Equity of Local Sales Tax Distributions in Urban, Suburban, Rural, and Tourism-Rich Counties in North Carolina.” 2015. Public Finance Review doi:10.1177/1091142115588976. (Article)
“Leviathan or Flypaper: Earmarked Local Sales Taxes for Transportation.” 2015. Public Budgeting & Finance 35(3): 1-23. (Article)