This paper studies the welfare effects of international investment to evade domestic taxes on domestic investment income. Capital mobility for tax evasion eliminates distortions in the intertemporal allocation of consumption, but introduces distortions in domestic production. Conversely, a...

We study the location and timing of annual shareholder meetings. When companies move their annual meetings a great distance from headquarters, they tend to announce disappointing earnings results and experience pronounced stock market underperformance in the months after the meeting. Companies...

Amnesties are widely used in society to rehabilitate past sinners, to collect resources, such as library books, that would otherwise be unrecoverable, and to make enforcement easier by reducing the ranks of delinquents. Over the past four years, tax amnesties have emerged as a major instrument...

We show that the fiscal authorities of high-tax countries can lack the incentives to combat profit shifting to tax havens. Instead, they have incentives to focus their enforcement efforts on relocating profits booked by multinationals in other high-tax countries, crowding out the enforcement on...

This paper studies individual and social motives in tax evasion. We build a simple dynamic model that incorporates these motives and their interaction. The social motives underpin the role of norms and is the source of the dynamics that we study. Our empirical analysis exploits the adoption in...

When tax structure changes, people may alter their consumption basket, but they also may call and give new instructions to their accountant, change their reports to the IRS, change the timing of transactions, and undertake a range of other actions that do not directly involve a change in their...

Americans who are caught evading taxes in one year may be audited for prior years. While the IRS does not disclose its method of selecting tax returns to audit, it is widely believed that a taxpayer's probability of being audited is an increasing function of current evasion. Under these...

This paper uses time-series data to investigate how changes in capital gains tax rates affect taxpayer compliance. It finds that a one percent increase in the marginal tax rate reduces voluntary compliance by between one half and one percent. These results confirm the findings of previous...

This paper analyzes the relationship between optimal taxation -- where the literature considers raising revenue with minimum distortion -- and optimal tax enforcement where much of the literature emphasizes raising revenue at the least cost. A central question concerns the extent to which...

For most parameter values, increased randomness about how much taxable income an auditor would assess leads to higher reported income and more revenue, When reducing randomness is costly, optimality requires some randomness in assessed taxable Income. Even if reducing randomness g costless,...