Americans have been inundated with financial scandals at large corporations during the past two years. In many cases, unethical behavior and poor oversight of corporate management are to blame. But a deeper look reveals that the flawed structure of the corporate income tax has been a key driver...

It comes as no surprise to any observant person in this country that there is a wide disparity in our federal income tax treatment of persons who have differing incomes and financial resources. But while much has been written on tax law complexity and inefficiency, little or nothing has been...

The post highlights three main issues that may result from the rapid and widespread automation of jobs: 1) declining tax revenues; 2) inequitable distribution of gains and losses from automation; and 3) social costs of job displacement, such as social support and retraining programmes for...

Researchers in a number of fields have explored the question of why people voluntarily comply with the tax laws. The resulting scholarship suggests that a number of factors influence that decision, but the precise role of, and interaction between, those factors continue to be subjects of debate....

One of the main advantages of consumption taxation that its advocates, including me, have claimed is simplification. However, the extent to which simplification actually would result from a major consumption-based tax reform would depend not only on the compliance and administrative issues...

In recent years, federal government agencies have increasingly attempted to use plain language in written communications with the public. The Plain Writing Act of 2010, for instance, requires agencies to incorporate “clear and simple” explanations of rules and regulations into their official...

Non-tax legal rules regulating the workplace, the financial sector, real property, and many other areas affect the ability of governments to collect revenues and provide public goods. Yet tax-collection considerations rarely enter into economic analyses of non-tax legal rules. Usually,...

In the past year, a number of new financial transactions (such as the Fantex, Upstart and Pave transactions) have emerged that allow individuals to raise funds by offering a percentage interest in their future earnings. Unlike traditional lending arrangements, these structures essentially enable...

The U.S. economy exhibits high inequality and low economic mobility across generations relative to other high-income countries. The United States will need to raise more revenues in order to reduce these disparities, finance much-needed new services and investments, and address the nation's...

Since the turn of the current century, leading transnational organizations and academic scholarship have identified tax competition among countries as one of the scourges of the international tax regime. Both the EU and the OECD have warned that tax competition erodes the tax bases of Member...