Download or read book Essays on Behavioral Responses to Taxation written by Robert Andrew Whitten and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three chapters that explore behavioral responses to taxation. The first two chapters are largely empirical, drawing on administrative tax data to study income reporting decisions and withdrawals from Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs). The third chapter is an exploration of optimal tax theory when markets are imperfectly competitive and consumers do not maximize their own utility.
Download or read book Essays on Behavioral Responses to Corporate and Personal Income Taxation written by Sean Mc Auliffe and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Behavioral Responses to Taxes Essays on Tax Complexity and Individual Tax Compliance Behavior written by Daniela Kühne and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays on Behavioral Responses to Social Insurance and Taxation written by Arthur Seibold and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Avoidance Evasion and Non filing Three Essays on Behavioral Responses to Taxation written by Tobias Alexander Hauck and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays on Behavioral Responses and Tax Incentives written by Clive Noel Werdt and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays on Behavioral Responses of Multinational Enterprises to International Taxation written by Georg Wamser and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Empirical Essays on Behavioural Responses to Taxation microform written by Kevin Scott Milligan and published by National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada. This book was released on 2001 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays in Behavioral and Public Economics written by Alexander Robert Rees-Jones and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation presents two lines of research, each aimed at developing and assessing psychologically-motivated economics research in the realm of public policy. In the first chapter I present a theory of tax sheltering activities motivated by prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979), where a loss-averse citizen frames a refund as a gain and a tax payment as a loss. A unique implication of this theory is a discrete drop in the marginal benefit of tax sheltering once crossing the threshold into the gain domain. This drives excess tax sheltering among individuals owing money on tax day, and an excess mass of individuals to shelter precisely to the gain/loss threshold. I investigate these implications in 19791990 IRS panel of individual returns and find strong support for loss aversion. A mixture-modeling approach is developed to estimate model parameters and conduct policy simulations. Estimates suggest that psychologically-motivated framing effects can have substantial impact on tax revenue. I discuss the implications of these results for the detection and deterrence of tax evasion, the implementation of tax-incentivized public programs, and forecasting behavioral response to tax policy changes. The second and third chapters assess current uses of happiness or subjective well-being (SWB) data in economic settings. Economists and policy makers often estimate the tradeoffs individuals accept and forecast the choices they will make. An increasingly-used approach to this exercise uses survey responses to SWB questions as a direct measure of economists' notion of utility. The research presented here directly assesses these practices across a variety of settings. Chapter 2 reports the results of three surveys eliciting choice and SWB over alternatives in a battery of hypothetical scenarios. Chapter 3 reports the results of a field study of medical residency choice, allowing the side-by-side comparison of choice-based and SWB-based tradeoff estimates. Across these studies, we find that while choice and SWB rankings are often reasonably well aligned, systematic differences exist, and are particularly problematic for inference on marginal rates of substitution. We discuss the implications of our results for the use of SWB measures in economic applications and the comparative performance of different SWB-based approaches.
Download or read book Essays in Taxation written by Kyle Thomas Rozema and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contributes to an understanding of the general equilibrium effects of tax policies. In "Excise Taxes and Retail Outlets: Evidence from Panel Data with Transaction-Level Costs, Prices, and Sales", I investigate the impact of excise taxes on retailer behavior and profits. My empirical analysis employs a unique panel dataset on transaction-level retailer costs, prices, and sales that allows me to conduct the study without any assumptions about market structure. Using convenience stores and cigarette taxes as a case study, I find that retailers respond to each $1 increase in state cigarette taxes by decreasing markup by an average of $0.06 per pack, and witness a decrease in weekly profits from cigarette sales of $90. In "The Effect of Tax Expenditures on Automatic Stabilizers: Methods and Evidence", Hautahi Kingi and I analyze the effect of tax expenditures on automatic stabilizers. We propose a microsimulation strategy which exploits links that we identify between automatic stabilizers, tax expenditures, and effective marginal tax rates. Our strategy improves upon current stabilization measures that suffer from an invalid assumption used to translate automatic stabilization of aggregate tax revenue to consumption. Using the Survey of Consumer Finances from 1988 to 2009, we estimate that the Mortgage Interest Deduction and the Charitable Contributions Deduction decreased, and the Earned Income Tax Credit increased, the stabilizing power of the tax system by an average 0.31%, 0.03%, and 1.42%, respectively. In "Behavioral Responses to Taxation: Cigarette Taxes and Food Stamp TakeUp", Nicolas Ziebarth and I investigate a previously unexplored behavioral response to taxation: whether smokers compensate for higher cigarette taxes by enrolling in food stamps. First, we show theoretically that increases in cigarette taxes can induce food stamp take-up of non-enrolled, eligible smoking households. Then, we study the theoretical predictions empirically by exploiting between and within-household variation in food stamp enrollment from the Current Population Survey as well as data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. The empirical evidence strongly supports the model predictions. Higher cigarette taxes increase the probability that low-income smoking households take-up food stamps.
Download or read book Essays on Taxation and Firm Behavior written by Nirupama S. Rao and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays that examine the impact of tax policy of firm behavior. The first chapter uses new well-level production data on California oil wells and after-tax producer prices to estimate how temporary taxes affect oil production decisions. Theory suggests that temporary taxes could lead producers to shut wells, and more generally that they create strong incentives for retiming extraction of the exhaustible resource to minimize tax burdens. The empirical estimates suggest small estimates of extensive responses to after-tax prices, meaning that wells are rarely shut, but they also suggest substantial retiming of production for operating wells. While the estimates vary with specifications, the elasticity of oil production with respect to the after-tax price is estimated to fall between 0.208 and 0.261. The estimates are used to calibrate a simple model of the efficiency cost of tax-induced distortions relative to the no-tax optimal extraction path. Calculations suggest that a 15 percent temporary excise tax on California oil producers reduces the present value of producer surplus by between one and five percent of the no-tax surplus or between 113 and 166 percent of the government revenue raised, depending on the original life of the well and the duration of the temporary tax. The second chapter examines the impact of the federal R&D tax credit on research spending during the 1981-1991 period using both publicly available data from 10-Ks and confidential data from federal corporate tax returns. The key advance on previous work is the use of an instrumental variables strategy based on tax law changes that addresses the potential simultaneity between R&D spending and its user cost. The results yield a range of estimates for the effect of tax incentives on R&D investment. Estimates using only publicly available data suggest that a ten percent tax subsidy for R&D yields on average between $3.5 (0.24) million and $10.7 (1.79) million in new R&D spending per firm. Estimates from IRS SOI data suggest that a ten percent reduction in the user cost would lead the average firm to increase qualified spending by $2.0 (0.39) million. Estimates from the much smaller merged sample suggest that qualified spending is responsive to the tax subsidy. A similar response in total spending is not statistically discernible in the merged sample. The inconsistency of estimates across datasets, instrument choice and specifications highlights the sensitivity of estimates of the tax-price elasticity of R&D spending. How a corporate tax reform will affect a firms reported earnings in the year of its enactment, and how the firm may choose to react to the tax reform, depend in part on the sign and magnitude of the firms net deferred tax position. The final chapter, written jointly with Jim Poterba and Jeri Seidman, compiles new disaggregated deferred tax position data for a sample of large U.S. firms between 1993 and 2004. These data are used to assess the size and composition of deferred tax assets and liabilities and their magnitudes relative to the book-tax income gap. We find that temporary differences account for a substantial share of the book-tax income gap. The key contributors to the increase in the book-tax gap include mark-to-market adjustments, property and valuation allowances. In interpreting the data we collect on deferred tax assets and liabilities in the context of the behavioral incentives surrounding a tax rate change, we find that a pre-announced reduction in the corporate tax rate would give a third of the firms in our sample to a strong incentive to accelerate income to the high-tax period, contrary to typical expectations that fail to take deferred tax positions into account.
Download or read book Essays on the Behavioral Effects of Tax Policy written by John Allen Deskins and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Behavioral Responses to Tax Rates written by Martin S. Feldstein and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper uses the experience after the Tax Reform Act of 1986 to examine how taxes affect three aspects of individual taxpayer behavior: labor supply, total taxable income, and capital gains. The substantial sensitivity of married women's labor supply implies that the efficiency of the tax system could be increased significantly by reducing the marginal tax rates of these women relative to their husbands' marginal tax rates. More generally, the sensitivity of taxable income to the net of tax share implies that lower marginal tax rates would involve much less revenue loss than is traditionally assumed and would bring a much more substantial reduction in the deadweight loss of the tax system. The sharp fall in the real value of realized capital gains since the 1986 rise in tax rates on capital gains confirms earlier research indicating the substantial sensitivity of capital gains realizations to tax rates. A comparison with projections by the Treasury and Congressional Budget Office made in 1988 shows that the current official model greatly understates the sensitivity of capital gains to tax rates
Download or read book Strategic Responses to Taxation and Welfare Effects of Tax Policies written by Sylvia Mwamba and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation focuses on firms' strategic responses to taxation and the welfare implications of changes in tax structure. The dissertation is comprised of three essays. In the first essay, I use the Tax Reform Act of 1986 to investigate how firms adjust their tax strategies in response to the tax incentives induced by the reform. The results in essay one suggest that the 1986 reform created incentives for firms following a sustainable tax strategy to engage in more tax avoidance behavior. In essay two, I test for the presence of strategic cost shifting behavior by examining the distribution of taxable income around kinks in the corporate tax code. Specifically, the McCrary's (2008) density test, which was developed as a validity test in regression discontinuity design (RDD) is applied to a data set of US firms for the period 1988-2010. The results show that reported taxable income has a tendency to bunch at levels just under upward kinks in the marginal tax rate. Conversely, taxable income tends to exhibit gaps in the region below a downward kink in marginal tax rates. Both findings suggest that firms manipulate taxable income in response to kinks in the corporate tax code. In essay three, I provide an explicit model that illustrates the incentives for strategic cost shifting behavior when the tax code exhibits kinks. In the presence of upward kinks in marginal tax rates, profit maximizing firms will choose a path for investment that makes pre-tax profits bunch just below the kink point. I then use the model to quantify the welfare cost of kinks in the marginal tax rates. Additionally, I find that replacing a kinked tax code with one in which marginal tax rates rise smoothly retains the progressivity inherent in the current tax code while largely avoiding the welfare costs associated with large jumps in marginal tax rates.
Download or read book Inequality Fairness Perception Et Legal Tax Avoidance written by Eva Kristina Matthaei and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays on Behavioral Tax Research and Tax Accounting written by Matthias Sünwoldt and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays in Public Finance written by Alisa Tazhitidnova and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thesis I explore how the elements of tax systems affect individuals' behavior. The goal is to enhance our understanding of how tax responses are affected by search and adjustment costs, information frictions, hassle costs and behavioral biases in general. In the first chapter, I provide theoretical and empirical evidence on the importance of statutory incidence in labor markets in presence of asymmetric frictions. Using a theoretical model I show that labor supply responses are stronger when the statutory incidence of taxes or labor rules falls on firms. The asymmetry of response stems from the assumption that firms have a greater ability to respond to incentives than workers because it is easier for firms to change working hours. The result holds even if wages adjust to equalize differences in labor costs stemming from taxes and regulations. I explore these mechanisms by studying labor responses to incentives generated by the "Mini-Job" program aimed at increasing labor supply of low-income individuals in Germany. Using administrative data, I show evidence of a strong behavioral response - in the form of sharp bunching - to the mini-job threshold that generates large discontinuous changes both in the marginal tax rates and in the total income and payroll tax liability of individuals in Germany. Sharp bunching translates into elasticity estimates that are an order of magnitude larger than has been previously estimated using the bunching approach. To explain the magnitude of the observed response, I show that in addition to tax rates, fringe benefit payments also change at the threshold. Using a large survey of businesses and a household survey, I compare wages and fringe benefits around the mini-job threshold and find that mini-job workers are paid higher gross wages but receive smaller yearly bonuses and fewer vacation days than regular workers. These results indicate that lower fringe benefits make mini-jobs attractive to employers, thus facilitating labor supply responses in accordance with the model's predictions. In the second chapter, I study behavioral responses to changes in marginal tax rates of social security and income taxes. I find that responses depend on individual's employment status: whether a worker is a wage earner, self-employed, or a proprietor. In line with the existing literature I document weak (but statistically significant) bunching at kink points of the tax schedule among wage earners. Starting from 1999, wage earners accumulate pension credits when they exceed a certain threshold, however, no contributions are due until earnings reach a second, higher threshold. Even 10 years after this reform I find no bunching to the right of the eligibility threshold, suggesting that individuals do not assign a high value to pension benefits. Lack of bunching is persistent across age groups and unlikely to be explained by friction costs as individuals are able to bunch at other kink points. I find strong responses to tax incentives among the self-employed but the responses differ by the type of kink. I find sharp bunching at the first kink, medium bunching at the top kink and weak bunching at the middle kink. Comparing responses before and after a tax reform that changed the magnitude of kinks I find that self-employed individuals aggressively reduce earnings to bunch at the lower, more salient kink points. In the third chapter, I study information reporting, which has been argued to be an effective tool against evasion. However, even the simplest reporting requirements can prove to be costly to taxpayers. The trade-off between evasion and compliance costs suggests that reporting rules should only be imposed on a subset of the population. In this paper I address the question of how to optimally determine such reporting thresholds. In the first part of the paper I use a natural experiment to document that reporting rules are indeed costly to taxpayers but are successful at reducing evasion. I study a reform that simplified reporting rules for an income tax deduction of noncash charitable contributions in the U.S. Relying on a revealed preference approach, I find that relaxing reporting requirements led to a steady increase in reported donations but that nearly 50% of these new donations were untruthful. The tax revenue loss, however, was offset by substantial savings for taxpayers because reporting requirements impose substantial hassle costs: $90 on average per person. In the second part of the paper I develop a framework which allows me to characterize optimal reporting thresholds. I show that the determination of optimal thresholds should take into account the utility loss from reporting experienced by individuals and a loss in externality benefits from charitable giving against the tax revenue loss generated by evasion. The size of a reporting threshold is primarily governed by the type and magnitude of cheating. Calibrations of the model shows that in the case of noncash charitable donation deductions, the optimal threshold is more than twice lower than the threshold chosen by the government.
