Taxation Commons^™

Evidence Of The Lack Of Effectiveness Of Low-Income Savings Incentives, Julia Camp, Teresa Stephenson, Stacy Wade

Julia M. Camp

In view of the government’s propensity to develop programs to encourage savings, we examine a group of individuals to whom these programs are targeted: low- to moderate-income taxpayers. We show that saving for retirement is not a priority in the lives of these taxpayers. The low priority given to saving is often due to immediate necessary costs such as housing, food, and transportation. However, our study shows that even nonessential items and activities such as cable and internet services or travel are often considered more important than saving. We also show that most of the participants were not even ...

Can Education Improve Tax Compliance? Evidence From Different Forms Of Tax Education, Raymond M. K. Wong, Wai-Yee, Agnes Lo

Hong Kong Institute of Business Studies Working Paper Series

We examine whether tax compliance is improved via different forms of tax education. We argue that different types of tax education have respective impacts on tax compliance. To explore this empirical issue, we conduct a survey related to tax compliance among 205 students taking either a general tax course or a technical tax course in Hong Kong. Our findings suggest that sales tax compliance among undergraduate students was significantly improved if they had been exposed to a general tax education, and income and sales tax compliance among postgraduate students were significantly improved if they had taken a technical tax course.

Theory And Experiments Exploring Behavioral, Financial, And Public Economics, Matthew John Mcmahon

Doctoral Dissertations

I study three questions which relate to one another only in that each explores facets of economics. First, I theoretically examine the conditions under which introducing an impure public good decreases total public provision. I introduce a central planner who can tax the private good to correct this and identify the market characteristics that typify this scenario. Second, I test the two standard competing dividend puzzle hypotheses using a laboratory experiment. Evidence from the lab, including variables unobservable in the field, reinforces empirical work supporting the outcome model over the substitute. Last, I obscure from dictators information regarding recipients' income ...

The Effects Of Gaming Taxation On Capital Investment In Gaming Businesses, Jeremy Pollock

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Microeconomic theory generally supports the idea of an inverse relationship between taxes and capital investment. The gaming industry however does not operate on a free market equilibrium of supply and demand. Regulation and taxation of this industry can distort competitive forces and, as a result, investment decisions. Forces are described herein which either strengthen or weaken this inverse relationship, as well as how they affect the value of the limited number of casino operating licenses which states grant. Higher tax rates are generally shown to result in small-scale properties, which cater to a narrow base of consumers. In contrast, low ...

Ending The R&D Tax Credit Stalemate, Nirupama Rao

Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative

The 113th Congress extended the research and development (R&D) tax credit through the end of 2014 by passing the Tax Increase Prevention Act (H.R. 5771), which President Obama signed into law on December 19, 2014. That the fate of this credit in 2015 remains unknown is not surprising. This brief explores the history, logistics, and policy implications of the temporary R&D tax credit, and offers recommendations for additional research that would help determine the merit of making the credit permanent. Using new, restricted-access IRS data and an instrumental variables strategy, the brief offers an unbiased estimation of ...

Corporate Connections That Advance Careers

Business Exchange

No abstract provided.

Estate Taxes And The Investment Decision In Closely Held Firms, Rubin Saposnik, James Tompkins, Roger Tutterow

James Tompkins

Closely held businesses differ from their publicly held counterparts in the relative importance assigned to planning for estate taxes. When faced with the prospect of an estate taxes liability, owners of closely held businesses may alter their investment behavior. This essay presents a simple model of the investment decision in a closely held business. While finance theory prescribes that firms maximize their value through funding capital projects with positive net present values, this model suggests that the presence of estate taxes may induce the firm to reject projects which, if funded, would add value to the firm. Further, the propensity ...

Can Wealth Taxes Be Justified, Eric Rakowski

Eric Rakowski

No abstract provided.

Hardship Withdrawals And Loans: Some Words Of Caution, Emily G. Brown Jd, Jeanne Medeiros Jd, Ellen Bruce Jd

Pension Action Center Publications

As defined benefit pension plans become more and more rare, the responsibility of saving for retirement falls increasingly on individuals. Many studies have been published about the average or median balances in retirement savings accounts and virtually all of them have reached the same conclusion - most Americans aren’t saving enough money to last them through their retirement years.

In this fact sheet we will take a look at one of the factors that contributes to this problem, that is, the availability of loans and hardship withdrawals from 401(k) retirement accounts, which can lead to lower account balances overall ...

Splitting Specified Foreign Sourced Income Between Tax Exempt And Taxable Portions: An Optimal Solution (Part 3 Of 3), Teng Aun Khoo, Clement Kai Guan Tan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

No abstract provided.

Re-Investment Allowance, Investment Tax Credit, And The Reality Of Corporate Cash Flow In Nigeria, Daibi W. Dagogo

Daibi W Dagogo

This study examines the influences of tax incentives on cash flow of manufacturing corporations in Nigeria. To do this, research questions were raised, hypotheses were formulated, sixty (60) quoted manufacturing companies in Nigeria constituted the sample of this study and secondary data from Nigeria Stock Exchange fact book were complemented with ordinal data collected via questionnaire. The stated hypotheses were statistically tested with paired t-test of two means from the same sample. T-test was eventually used because of the ordinal data, which might not satisfy the condition of normal distribution. Our findings revealed that tax incentives significantly increased the mean ...

Disclosure And Civil Penalty Rules In The U.S. Legal Response To Corporate Tax Shelters, Daniel Shaviro

Daniel Shaviro

This paper, written for a European conference on tax and corporate governance, evaluates two aspects of the U.S. legal response to corporate tax shelters: the civil penalty rules and the disclosure rules. It argues that, while the disclosure rules do not impose undue burdens, their usefulness to the IRS is limited by the difficulty of steering between the twin dangers of under-disclosure (permitting taxpayers to conceal close cousins of reportable transactions) and over-disclosure (creating information overload for the IRS). Thus, expanded reporting requirements with respect to book-tax differences in income accounting are likely to prove more useful to the ...

Beyond The Pro-Consumption Tax Consensus, Daniel Shaviro

Daniel Shaviro

In the last two decades, the dominant norm in fundamental tax reform has shifted from income taxation to consumption taxation, among academics no less than policymakers. Few have recognized, however, that the case for a consumption tax overlaps substantially with that for lifetime income averaging, an idea that has drawn considerably less support. Likewise, few have recognized that the grounds for unease about the case for income averaging (as an ideal system, leaving aside administrative concerns) apply equally to the case for consumption taxation.

Within a welfare economics framework, the case for both norms is close to irrefutable if one ...

Welfare, Cash Grants, And Marginal Rates, Daniel Shaviro

Daniel Shaviro

Marginal rates are frequently analyzed based solely on taxes, without regard to benefit phase-outs that have exactly the same incentive and distributional effects as increasing positive taxes. This myopia reflects the notion, rooted in our current fiscal language, that “taxes” and “spending” are fundamentally different. In fact, however, the difference is purely one of labeling. Among the ill consequences of this confusion between substance and labels is the political unfeasibility of demogrant or negative income tax proposals. These proposals often are criticized for seemingly providing universal and unconditional cash grants. In fact, however, cash grants can be just as conditional ...

The Long-Term U.S. Fiscal Gap: Is The Main Problem Generational Inequity?, Daniel Shaviro

Daniel Shaviro

Current U.S. budget policy is unsustainable because it violates the intertemporal budget constraint. While the resulting fiscal gap will eventually be eliminated whether we like it or not, the big issue in current budget debate is whether the ultimately unavoidable course corrections should start now or be left for later. This paper argues that concerns of generational equity, which often are relied on by those demanding a prompt course correction, do not convincingly settle the issue, given empirical uncertainties about future generations’ circumstances. However, efficiency issues create powerful grounds for urging a course correction sooner rather than later, on ...

Why Worldwide Welfare As A Normative Standard In U.S. Tax Policy?, Daniel N. Shaviro

Daniel Shaviro

Debate about U.S. international tax policy often emphasizes norms, such as capital export neutrality (CEN) and capital import neutrality (CIN), that relate to worldwide welfare rather than U.S. national welfare. While this focus may seem paradoxical, or at least surprisingly altruistic, in a world full of self-interested players, it potentially makes sense from a purely national perspective. Worldwide welfare norms can strengthen the impetus to cooperate with other countries rather than following beggar-your-neighbor strategies, potentially making all countries better off if adherence to the worldwide norm is sufficiently reciprocal.

This suggests that criticisms of U.S. international tax ...

The Optimal Relationship Between Taxable Income And Financial Accounting Income: Analysis And A Proposal, Daniel Shaviro

Daniel Shaviro

The persistence of the book-tax gap, or excess of companies’ reported financial accounting income over their taxable income, suggests that accounting manipulation and tax sheltering remain significant problems, even in the aftermath of the “Enron era.” Some have therefore suggested making the United States a “one-book” country, in which the same income measure would be used for both purposes. This Article offers the first systematic exploration of the optimal relationship between the two income measures, based on the distinct purposes they serve and the significance of two distinct sets of incentive problems: those pertaining to corporate managers, and to the ...

Permanent Income And The Annual Income Tax, Daniel N. Shaviro

Daniel Shaviro

Under a prominent and influential economic model known as the permanent income hypothesis, people s decisions depend on their expected lifetime income, not their current income. If completely true, this hypothesis would have radical implications for tax, transfer, and entitlements policy. For example, unless modified by other information, it would suggest replacing the income tax with a consumption tax, establishing lifetime income averaging, viewing Social Security as irrelevant other than as a system for transferring lifetime resources between individuals, and dramatically changing welfare law to base aid purely on people s lifetime income, as distinct from their current circumstances. However ...

Foreign Source Income Tax Exemption And Pooling System: Which Works Better? (Part 2 Of 3), Clement Kai Guan Tan, Teng Aun Khoo

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

When is it better to claim Foreign Source Income under the Pooling System rather than on the Foreign Source Income Exemption

Designing Focus Groups And Experiments To Evaluate Policy Approaches And Measures For Tackling Undeclared Work, Marina Polak, Lyubomir Mishkov, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

The aim of this Working Paper is to review the literature on conducting focus groups and experiments in the field of tax non-compliance and undeclared work, and then to set set a range of possible uses of focus groups and experiments to evaluate the feasibility of various policy measures in the context of Bulgaria, Croatia and Macedonia.