Behavioral Responses to Taxes
Behavioral Responses to Taxes

Author: Nada Eissa

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 40

ISBN-13:

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Twenty-two million families currently receive a total of $34 billion dollars in benefits from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). In fact, the EITC is the largest cash transfer program for lower-income families at the federal level. An unusual feature of the credit is its explicit goal to use the tax system to encourage and support those who choose to work. A large body of work has evaluated the labor supply effects the EITC and has generated several important findings regarding the behavioral response to taxes. Perhaps the main lesson learned from the evidence is the confirmation that real responses to taxes are important; labor supply does respond to the EITC. The second major lesson is related to the nature of the labor supply response. A consistent finding is that labor supply responses are concentrated along the extensive (entry) margin, rather than the intensive (hours worked) margin. This distinction has important implications for the design of tax-transfer programs and for the welfare evaluation of tax reforms.

Behavioral Responses to Tax Rates
Behavioral Responses to Tax Rates

Author: Martin S. Feldstein

Publisher:

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 12

ISBN-13:

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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

Essays on Behavioral Responses to Taxation
Essays on Behavioral Responses to Taxation

Author: Robert Andrew Whitten

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13:

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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.

Behavioral Responses to State Income Taxation of High Earners
Behavioral Responses to State Income Taxation of High Earners

Author: Joshua Rauh

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 74

ISBN-13:

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Drawing on the universe of California income tax filings and the variation imposed by a 2012 tax increase of up to 3 percentage points for high-income households, we present new findings about the effects of personal income taxation on household location choice and pre-tax income. First, over and above baseline rates of taxpayer departure from California, an additional 0.8% of the California residential tax filing base whose 2012 income would have been in the new top tax bracket moved out from full-year residency of California in 2013, mostly to states with zero income tax. Second, to identify the impact of the California tax policy shift on the pre-tax earnings of high-income California residents, we use as a control group high-earning out-of-state taxpayers who persistently file as California non-residents. Using a differences-in-differences strategy paired with propensity score matching, we estimate an intensive margin elasticity of 2013 income with respect to the marginal net-of-tax rate of 2.5 to 3.3. Among top-bracket California taxpayers, outward migration and behavioral responses by stayers together eroded 45.2% of the windfall tax revenues from the reform.