In a July 2020 report, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that modest investments in the IRS would generate somewhere between $60 and $100 billion in additional revenue over a decade. This is qualitatively correct. But quantitatively, the revenue potential is much more significant than...

Using data on trust and trustworthiness from the 1990 wave of the World Values Survey, I first investigate a model of the extent of tax cheating and the size of government that recognizes the interdependence of the two. The results reveal that tax cheating is lower in countries that exhibit more...

In this paper, we analyze the tax compliance behavior of US taxpayers by using a 1979 data set that combines information from a random sample of individual tax returns each of which has been thoroughly audited, IRS administrative records, and sociodemographic data from the Census. We find...

Tax evasion generates billions of dollars of losses in government revenue and creates large distortions, especially in developing countries. Claims that the VAT facilitates tax enforcement by generating paper trails on transactions between firms have contributed to widespread VAT adoption...

When tax structure changes, people may alter their consumption basket, but they also may call and give new instructions to their accountant, change their reports to the IRS, change the timing of transactions, and undertake a range of other actions that do not directly involve a change in their...

This paper uses time-series data to investigate how changes in capital gains tax rates affect taxpayer compliance. It finds that a one percent increase in the marginal tax rate reduces voluntary compliance by between one half and one percent. These results confirm the findings of previous...

Amnesties are widely used in society to rehabilitate past sinners, to collect resources, such as library books, that would otherwise be unrecoverable, and to make enforcement easier by reducing the ranks of delinquents. Over the past four years, tax amnesties have emerged as a major instrument...

This paper studies individual and social motives in tax evasion. We build a simple dynamic model that incorporates these motives and their interaction. The social motives underpin the role of norms and is the source of the dynamics that we study. Our empirical analysis exploits the adoption in...

Traditional explanations for indirect trade through an entrepot have focused on savings in transport costs and on the role of specialized agents in processing and distribution. We provide an alternative perspective based on the possibility that entrepots may facilitate tariff evasion. Using data...

Educators worry that high-stakes testing will induce teachers and their students to focus only on the test and ignore other, untested aspects of knowledge. Some counter that although this may be true, knowing something is better than knowing nothing and many students would benefit even by...