Each year Americans spend over two billion hours and $30 billion preparing individual tax returns, and these filing costs are regressive. To lower and redistribute the filing burden, some commentators have proposed having the IRS pre-populate tax returns for individuals. We evaluate this...

Tax return data are increasingly the standard for tracking income statistics in the United States. However, these data have traditionally been limited by their inability to capture non-filers and to identify members of separate tax units living in the same household. We overcome these obstacles...

We investigate the degree to which corporations can manipulate their accounting of expenses to avoid taxes, and estimate the corresponding effects for corporate tax bases. We exploit a unique corporate tax reform in Texas that replaced a 4.5% profits tax with a much broader 1% tax on gross...