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 The Economics of Tax Policy written by Alan J. Auerbach and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Debates about the optimal structure for tax policies and tax rates hardly cease among public, policy, or academic audiences. These have only grown more heated in the United States as the gap between incomes of the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the population continue to diverge. Tax research perhaps has not fully kept pace with the relentless demand of various interests to adjust tax policy. Nonetheless, specialists in the economics of tax policy in recent years have profited from advances in economic theory, econometric measurements, and data quality and access that are beginning to allow a greater consensus on what are the real effects of tax policy and how government levies affect individuals and businesses. The volume edited by Professors Auerbach and Smetters represents an attempt to reduce the lag between the conduct of research on tax issues and its transmission to a broader public. The contributions would explore highly topical issues such as the effects of income tax changes on economic growth, the potential effects of capping certain tax expenditures, the economics of adjusted business tax policy, and environmental tax options. Other essays would investigate perennially important themes such as the conduct of tax administration, the growing role of the tax system on education policy, tax policy toward low-income families, capital gains and estate taxation, and tax policy for retirement savings. A final paper would examine three different options for fundamental tax reform"--

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 Three Essays on the Effect of Taxes on Economic Behavior written by Anil Kumar and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Effect of Taxes on Firm and Individual Behavior written by Stacy Dickert-Conlin and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Behavioral Tax Policy and Political Violence written by Emiliano Raphael Huet-Vaughn and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation includes original research in the fields of behavioral public economics and political economy. The first chapter provides evidence from a field experiment testing whether exposure to relative earnings information impacts worker effective labor supply. I exogenously manipulate access to information about relative position in the distribution of worker earnings as well as the shape of the distribution among workers engaged in piece rate, web-based clerical work. There are four main findings. First, those exposed to information about their placement in the earnings distribution provide significantly more labor effort on average than those with no information about peer earnings. Second, labor supply elasticity with respect to net of tax wages, a key sufficient statistic for optimal income tax policy, is unchanged between the two groups. Third, the higher productivity observed among workers exposed to relative earnings information is driven by those workers who experienced an exogenously assigned high relative earnings rank and low average comparison group earnings. Fourth, this later finding is gendered in the sense that women supply more labor regardless of whether they learn they occupy high or low relative standing while men supply significantly more labor only upon learning they occupy high relative standing. A model of worker preferences that incorporates status concerns is shown to reconcile these seemingly disparate findings in contrast to several alternatives considered. These findings suggest that governments can potentially use relative earnings information to grow the tax base - but not to affect optimal labor income tax rates - and that firms can generate significant productivity boosts simply by providing workers with information about the earnings of their peers. The second chapter addresses an entirely different question, namely, the efficacy of violent forms of protest. It takes as its point of departure the acknowledgment that estimating the effect of violent forms of political protest on protest success is complicated by endogeneity and omitted variable bias. To address this problem, I utilize instrumental variables methods to estimate a causal effect of violent protest on the likelihood that protesters win policy concessions. Using daily French protest data and a set of weather and school holiday instruments, I find a significant and negative relationship between property destruction associated with protests and the chance of near-term success in changing policy. The IV estimates are larger than OLS estimates and are robust to a variety of alternative specifications. Such findings are predicted by several posited endogeneity channels, and, they suggest that political violence does not, in fact, pay off.

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 Tax Policy and Its Effect on Firm Behaviour written by Ferdinand Springer 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 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 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 Behavioral Simulation Methods in Tax Policy Analysis written by Martin Feldstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1983-05-01 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These thirteen papers and accompanying commentaries are the first fruits of an ongoing research project that has concentrated on developing simulation models that incorporate the behavioral responses of individuals and businesses to alternative tax rules and rates and on expanding computational general equilibrium models that analyze the long-run effects of changes on the economy as a whole. The principal focus of the project has been on the microsimulation of individual behavior. Thus, this volume includes studies of individual responses to an over reduction in tax rates and to changes in the highest tax rates; a study of alternative tax treatments of the family; and studies of such specific aspects of household behavior as tax treatment of home ownership, charitable contributions, and individual saving behavior. Microsimulation techniques are also used to estimate the effects of alternative policies on the long-run financial status of the social security program and to examine the effects of alternative tax rules on corporate investment and of foreign-source income on overseas investment. The papers devoted to the development of general equilibrium simulation models to include an examination of the implications of international trade and capital flows, a study of the effects of capital taxation that uses a closed economy equilibrium model, and an examination of the effect of switching to an inflation-indexed tax system. In the volume's final paper, a life-cycle model in which individuals maximize lifetime utility subject to a lifetime budget constraint is used to simulate the effects of tax rules on personal savings.

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 Taxing Wages 2021 written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-29 with total page 651 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This annual publication provides details of taxes paid on wages in OECD countries. It covers personal income taxes and social security contributions paid by employees, social security contributions and payroll taxes paid by employers, and cash benefits received by workers. Taxing Wages 2021 includes a special feature entitled: “Impact of COVID-19 on the Tax Wedge in OECD Countries”.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economic Effects of Tax Policy written by Inga Bethmann and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Why People Pay Taxes written by Joel Slemrod and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experts discuss strategies for curtailing tax evasion

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 Two Essays on Government Behavior written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The main theme of this dissertation is government's strategic behaviors. We show that different budget structures give governments incentives to behave differently, and that the Leviathan model and the Bureaucratic model are better in modeling government behaviors than the median voter model. We first discuss theoretically the design of an optimal tax system, promoting the Leviathan government to maximize social welfare in order to maximize its own revenue. Then we examine empirically how government behaviors vary with different budget structures. In essay I, we apply the Buchanan-Brennan (B-B) rule to examine the effects of a tax system on the efficiency of agricultural production in the context of Chinese local governments, which receive insufficient control from the central and are free from the pressure from local residents due to asymmetric information and lack of horizontal accountability. We extend the B-B rule to include the incentive issues and the risk sharing, and also their trade-off. Farmers and the agricultural sector assume significant roles in the national economy of China, while the under-provision of public infrastructures and the risks involved negatively affect agricultural production and therefore impede economic growth. Within the principal-agent framework, we illustrate how the problem is inherent in the agriculture tax system in China and propose our solution of special earmarking. In essay II, we test empirically for the government's strategic behaviors. We argue that the environmental performance is affected by government policy. Therefore it relates inherently to the budget structure and government incentives. With an illustrating model between structure of revenue and expenditure and pollution level, we propose three hypotheses, which state that the lower the ratio of business related tax in total revenue, the higher the ratio of property tax in total revenue, the higher the share of health expenditure in total expenditure, the government will have higher incentive to control pollution and thus the pollution level is lower. Our empirical evidence provides support to our hypotheses, which show that structures of revenue and expenditure do affect the government's incentives to control pollution. Therefore, changes in the budget structure might be helpful to achieve better environmental performance.