Do Audits Deter or Provoke Future Tax Noncompliance? Evidence on Self-employed Taxpayers

Online Robustness Appendix to “Are Household Surveys Like Tax Forms: Evidence from the Self Employed”

Responses of the Self-Employed to the 2001 Tax Act

The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 reduced individual income tax rates for most taxpayers. The conventional wisdom, and evidence from earlier reductions in marginal tax rates, suggests that such reductions are associated with expansions of small businesses. In this paper I investigate how the business decisions of self-employed taxpayers responded to the 2001 rate cut...

Self-employed Individuals' Tax Retirement Act of 1962.

Tax incentives as a solution to the uninsured: evidence from the self-employed.

Between 1996 and 2003, a series of amendments were made to the Tax Reform Act of 1986 that gradually increased the tax deduction for health insurance purchases by the self-employed (SE) from 25 to 100 percent. We study how these changes have influenced the likelihood that a SE person has health insurance coverage as the policyholder. The Current Population Survey is used to construct a data set...

Are Household Surveys Like Tax Forms: Evidence from Income Underreporting of the Self-Employed*

There is a large literature showing that the self-employed underreport their income to tax authorities. In this paper, we quantify the extent to which the self-employed also systematically underreport their income in U.S. household surveys. To do so, we use the Engel curve describing the relationship between income and expenditures of wage and salary workers to infer the actual income, and thus...