Previous experimental work has examined the effects of relaxing some assumptions upon which Ricardian equivalence is based. Notably, however, the impact of distortionary taxation on Ricardian equivalence has not been investigated. This paper tests the effects of distortionary versus...

It is hard for tax administrations to levy and collect taxes anywhere and anytime. However, taxing certain kinds of activities, sectors, or individuals – the so-called “informal sector” – is an additional challenge for tax administrations in both developing and developed countries, and...

Individuals in most all countries face a wide range of direct taxes on their income, especially variants of the individual income tax (IIT) and payroll taxes. For the IIT, attempts are often made to reduce the compliance and administrative costs of the tax (among other reasons) by using...

A significant amount of non-compliance associated with the personal income tax is due to the taxpayers who are not “in the system,” not having filed a tax return in the recent past or perhaps ever. We use experimental laboratory methods to examine two types of positive incentives for filing...

Globalization is thought to reduce the ability of governments to collect taxes. If labor and capital can move between jurisdictions, then attempts to tax these factors will lead to a "vanishing taxpayer" as factors flee from high- to low-tax regions. More broadly, globalization suggests that...

Most studies of student migration focus on interstate migration of college students, largely because the aggregate data typically used are limited in geographic specificity to states. However, interstate migration is only a small part of the total student migration. Public institutions generally...

The effect of taxes on divorce has not been considered in previous empirical work on divorce. In this paper we examine the impact of the individual income tax on the likelihood of divorce. Using data from the Panel Study on Income Dynamics, we estimate a discrete-time hazard model of the...

How does the presence of corruption affect the optimal mix between consumption and income taxation? In this paper we examine this issue using a simple neoclassical growth model, with a self-seeking and corrupt public sector. We find that the optimal tax mix in a corrupt economy is one that...