Dependent Variable
The dependent variables for the experiment were the use tax base for the 3rd Q 2003. The use
tax bases for the prior year (3rd Q 2002) provided a control and were entered as covariates in
ANCOVA models.' As is common with monetary variables with almost boundless ranges, the
dependent variable and the covariate exhibited distributional properties inconsistent with
ANCOVA requirements, and accordingly, we performed log transformations. Dollar means for the
variables are provided in Table 1 merely to provide context to the statisticcil results.