This Essay is based on my presentation to Temple University Beasley School of Law for the 2022 Frank and Rose Fogel Lecture Series. This is not intended to be a transcript of my remarks given on October 11, 2022, but instead, an opportunity to provide additional information regarding the Tax...

This paper incorporates the incentives of tax inspectors into an equilibrium model of tax compliance and enforcement when the taxpayers' true income is private information (adverse selection) and the effort of tax inspectors to verify reported income is unobservable (moral hazard). It...

This essay responds to Alex Raskolnikov's proposal to replace the current federal income tax compliance regime with a two-track approach based on taxpayer choice. The “deterrence regime” (DR) would be designed to be chosen by “gamers”, and the “compliance regime” (CR) would be...

Every spring, the federal government appears to deliver an abundance of announcements that describe criminal convictions and civil injunctions involving taxpayers who have been accused of committing tax fraud. Commentators have occasionally suggested that the government announces a large number...

Lawmakers, prosecutors, homeowners, policymakers, investors, news media, scholars and other commentators have examined, litigated, and reported on the role that residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) played in the 2008 financial crisis. Big banks create RMBS by pooling mortgage notes into...

Governments increasingly use changes in tax rules to combat evasion. We develop a general approach to point-identify tax compliance along with supply and demand elasticities; identification requires data on prices and quantities before and after changes in tax enforcement and a demand or supply...