This paper employs a long panel of income tax returns to examine trends in reported by the wealthy taxpayers over a number of tax reforms spanning the years 1979 through 1995. During this period, a number of tax reforms were enacted, including the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, the Tax...

This paper provides insight into the attributes of wage-earning households that participate in tax-deferred retirement savings plans. Examining data from federal tax returns, we find that approximately 52 percent of individuals and 55 percent of households participated in a retirement savings...

This paper explores the implications of evaluating income tax preferences, or tax expenditures, under a consumption tax baseline. First it examines the conceptual differences between income and consumption tax baselines. Next, an X-tax prototype of a consumption tax is employed to gauge the...

This paper examines the compliance pattern of small businesses, using pooled 1985 and 1988 Taxpayer Compliance Measurement Program (TCMP) data. Specifically, we focus on the voluntary reporting compliance of income from proprietorship, farm, and rental real estate activities. We find that...

The income tax deduction for charitable contributions is limited to a fraction of reported income. Consequently, some of the contributions by large donors are not deductible in the year of the transfer, if ever deductible at all. Because this limit is typically ignored in the empirical...