Local governments play dual, but conflicting roles in China's tax system. That is, they are both tax collectors and controlling shareholders of firms subject to tax payments. We investigate how local governments balance their tax collection and tax avoidance incentives. We find that the...

The Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act of 2010 was enacted by the 111th United States (US) Congress on March 18, 2010 to provide payroll tax forgiveness for hiring unemployed workers and business credit for retention of certain newly hired individuals in 2010. The Foreign Account...

This paper examines Act 32 of the Pennsylvania state legislature which mandated the introduction of withholding for the local earned income tax (EIT) for all employees and the consolidation of a fragmented collection system to one collector per county effective January 1, 2012. I find that the...

This paper investigates how tax rates and tax enforcement jointly impact fiscal capacity in low-income countries. We study a policy experiment in the D.R. Congo that randomly assigned 38,028 property owners to the status quo tax rate or to a rate reduction. This variation in tax liabilities...

This paper investigates the impact of a progressive tax reform on tax compliance. We leverage a major progressive tax reform in a large Argentine municipality. First, we use a quasi-experimental design to estimate the causal effect of changes in a household's own tax rates on its tax compliance....

The so called classic model of tax compliance behaviour interprets the problem as an individual decision under risk made by a single taxpayer. After a concise description of this model our literature survey investigates whether the empirical results found in the literature corroborate the...

This paper employs unique tax administrative data and operational audit information from a sample of approximately 7,500 self-employed U.S. taxpayers to investigate the effects of operational tax audits on future reporting behavior. Our estimates indicate that audits can have substantial...

This paper develops a framework to analyze partial population experiments, a generalization of the cluster experimental design where clusters are assigned to different treatment intensities. The framework allows for heterogeneity in cluster sizes and outcome distributions. The paper studies the...

Each year, individual tax non-compliance causes billions of dollars of lost tax revenue. While the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) conducts examinations of select returns, the audit rate fell precipitously in past decades. Meanwhile, the number of individual returns grew and return complexity...

A large body of research has estimated the effects on tax collection of informing taxpayers of their obligations. This paper examines the effects on voluntary tax payments of providing taxpayers with information on their obligations that is collected through massive information cross-checking...