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Taxpayer Reporting Responses and the Tax Reform Act of 1986
Author(s) -
ALM JAMES,
WALLACE SALLY
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
public budgeting and finance
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.694
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1540-5850
pISSN - 0275-1100
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-5850.2010.00960.x
Subject(s) - taxpayer , tax reform act , public economics , income tax , estimation , economics , accounting , tax reform , business , reform act , state income tax , actuarial science , gross income , political science , macroeconomics , law , management
This paper examines the effects of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 on the reporting decisions of taxpayers, using microlevel information from the 1984 and 1989 Statistics of Income. We find that tax reform clearly mattered in the reporting decisions of individuals, with reporting elasticities that cluster between 0.3 and 0.7. However, our results also indicate that individuals' estimated responses vary in different ways for individuals with different income levels, in ways that differ by the types of incomes received by taxpayers, in ways that are sensitive to the estimation approach, and in ways that depend upon data adjustment methods.