Policymakers have directed much effort towards reducing or eliminating the so-called "marriage penalty" present in the U.S. individual income tax. However, because the marriage penalty is frequently misunderstood, many suggested remedies do little to reduce the penalty, and in some cases even...

Strategies for reducing tax evasion include stricter enforcement, but taxpayer responses to increased enforcement are difficult to measure with field data. We use experimental methods to examine individual compliance responses to advance information on audit probability and productivity. Our...

Uses data from laboratory experiments to estimate individual responses to tax, penalty, and audit rate changes, as well as to changes in government expenditures. The empirical results confirm some (although not all) theoretical predictions, and compare qualititatively with other empirical work

Uses household data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to calculate the real value of the so-called "marriage tax" or "marriage subsidy" in the federal individual income tax over the period 1967- to 1994. Discusses different ways the marriage tax can be calculated and discusses changes that...

Recently, gay and lesbian couples have gone to court to force the government to allow same-sex couples to marry. Largely unnoticed during the debates surrounding same-sex marriages are their economic consequences, including the impact on government tax collections. It is well-known that a...

The rapid growth in online commerce has eroded state sales tax bases. However, the extent of this reduction is difficult to estimate. In this paper we collect our own data from eBay.com on a “representative” commodity classification and a “typical” day. Our data consist of nearly 21,000...

Uses experimental methods to analyze the long run impact of an amnesty. Explains post-amnesy compliance is higher when an amnesty is accompanied by increased enforcement efforts than when enforcement increases without an amnesty.

“Behavioral economics,” or the application of methods and evidence from other social sciences to economics, has increased greatly in significance in the last two decades. An important method by which many of its predictions have been tested has been via laboratory experiments. In this paper...

Discusses time series methods that can be used to examine the long run effects of a tax amnesty, and applies these methods to the 1985 Colorado amnesty. Suggests that a typical amnesty seems unlikely to generate significant new revenues, but also seems unlikely to compromise voluntary compliance.

The standard assumption underlying the incidence of tax evasion is that the beneficiaries are those who successfully evade their taxes. However, a general equilibrium process of adjustment should occur in response to tax evasion, involving changes in the relative prices of both commodities and...