Tax Compliance and Enforcement

By Joel B. Slemrod. Journal of Economic Literature, 2018

522 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper reviews recent economic research in tax compliance and enforcement. After briefly laying out the economics of tax evasion, it focuses on recent empirical contributions. It first discusses what methodologies and data have facilitated these contributions, and then presents critical summaries of what has been learned. It discusses a promising new development—the analysis of randomized controlled trials mostly delivered via letters from the tax authority—and then reviews recent research using various methods about the impact of the principal enforcement tax policy instruments: audits, information reporting, and remittance regimes. I also explore several understudied issues worthy of more research attention. The paper closes by outlining a normative framework based on the behavioral response elasticities now being credibly estimated that allow one to assess whether a given enforcement intervention is worth doing. (JEL H26, H30)

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a525b470b93c9489f737d6869b4fba85c75beabf

Citations in the corpus

• Nudging for Tax Compliance: A Meta-Analysis (2019, unknown): “Many excellent literature reviews have been written, such as Alm (2019), Andreoni et al. (1998), Slemrod (2007, 2019), Slemrod and Yitzhaki (2002) on tax compliance generally, as well as Luttmer and Singhal (2014) on tax morale, Mascagni (2018) on tax experiments and Pomeranz and VilaBelda (2019)…”
• How to Improve Tax Compliance? Evidence from Population-Wide Experiments in Belgium (2019, unknown): “There is now scattered evidence that these different drivers of tax compliance are important across a variety of settings (see Slemrod 2018), but several questions remain unanswered.”