Taxpayer Reporting Responses and the Tax Reform Act of 1986

This paper examines the effects of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 on the reporting decisions of taxpayers, using microlevel information from the 1984 and 1989 Statistics of Income. We find that tax reform clearly mattered in the reporting decisions of individuals, with reporting elasticities that cluster between 0.3 and 0.7. However, our results also indicate that individuals' estimated responses vary in different ways for individuals with different income levels, in ways that differ by the types of incomes received by taxpayers, in ways that are sensitive to the estimation approach, and in ways that depend upon data adjustment methods.