Can behavioral nudges and incentives help <scp>lower‐income</scp> households build emergency savings with tax refunds? Evidence from field and survey experiments

Tax Incentives: Issue and Evidence

British Income-Tax Refunds

currency, through the press, that persons claiming refunds of British income-tax have been called upon to pay duty on income derived from sources outside Great Britain. An impression so utterly false and entirely erroneous in its conception and distinctly libellous on the British Inland Revenue authorities should be immediately refuted. Applications for the refund of British tax cannot in any w...

The EITC, Tax Refunds, and Unemployment Spells

The Earned Income Tax Credit generates large average tax refunds for low-income parents, and these refunds are distributed in a narrow time frame. I rely on this plausibly exogenous source of variation in liquidity to investigate the effect of cash-on-hand on unemployment duration. Among EITC-eligible women, unemployment spells beginning just after tax refund receipt last longer than unemployme...

Temporary Investment Tax Incentives: Theory with Evidence from Bonus Depreciation

There are strong incentives to delay or accelerate investment to take advantage of predictable changes in after-tax prices. For sufficiently long-lived capital goods, these incentives are so strong that the intertemporal elasticity of investment demand is nearly infinite. For temporary tax changes, the equilibrium shadow price of long-lived capital goods should fully reflect the tax subsidy reg...

Coercive and legitimate authority impact tax honesty: evidence from behavioral and ERP experiments

Cooperation in social systems such as tax honesty is of central importance in our modern societies. However, we know little about cognitive and neural processes driving decisions to evade or pay taxes. This study focuses on the impact of perceived tax authority and examines the mental chronometry mirrored in ERP data allowing a deeper understanding about why humans cooperate in tax systems. We ...