Inequality and Taxation: Evidence from Data, Experiments, and Tax Policy Variation

收入不平等与税收：来自数据、实验和税收政策变化的证据近几十年来，收入不平等在美国以及许多经合组织国家急剧加剧。因此，制定更好、更及时的不平等衡量标准，以启发政策辩论是有价值的。税收和转移支付政策可能在遏制不平等方面发挥关键作用。因此，了解不平等的加剧会影响公众通过税收和转移支付进行更多再分配的偏好，并估算通过税收和转移支付增加再分配的经济成本，是有价值的。本建议的目标是利用行政数据和实验数据，在四个相关方面就这些问题取得进展。(1)利用美国国税局（IRS）数据库上实时发布的人口纳税申报数据，创建早期但准确的分配统计数据，这些统计数据可以比IRS收入统计部门公布的当前最终统计数据早近一年产生；(2)采用随机调查实验，分析了提供有关美国收入分配的互动信息对通过累进税和政治参与进行再分配的偏好的影响；(3)利用美国人口纳税申报数据和地理差异对劳动所得税抵免（EITC）的博弈知识进行评估，以评估实际劳动力供给对EITC的反应以及该计划的效率成本。(4)利用丹麦人口税和移民管理数据来评估一项特殊税收方案的效果，该方案向移居丹麦的高收入外国人提供有时间限制的低所得税率。拟议活动的潜在智力价值是显著提高我们在分析不平等和税收方面的知识。这种理解对于评估政府税收和转移政策的成本和收益至关重要，从而有助于决策者设计更好的税收和转移制度。为了在这个问题上取得进展，该提案提供了四种创新的研究设计。相对而言，很少有研究能够可靠地确定不平等对再分配偏好的影响。我们提出的随机调查实验是一种创新的方法，使用新的在线调查技术，可以以相对较低的成本提供随机处理和收集关于再分配偏好的信息。信息对税收行为反应的影响以前几乎没有被探讨过，并且可能是这种行为反应大小的一个重要决定因素。如果这种影响很大，政府可以以适度的成本增加旨在促进某些行为的项目的信息。劳动所得税抵免信息项目为在这个方向上取得进展提供了一个很好的机会。在欧盟内部以及美国各州的公共政策辩论中，税收引发的移民问题日益凸显。关于这个问题，文献中几乎没有证据。丹麦的特别税收计划为在这一重要但未得到充分探索的问题上开辟新天地提供了一条有希望的途径。拟议的活动产生的更广泛的影响是为政府统计机构（丹麦统计机构和美国国税局收入统计司）和研究人员之间的伙伴关系发展一种模式，这种模式既可以促进科学知识，也可以改善税收和转移政策的设计和实际执行。在EITC项目的案例中，我们的研究经验可以用于进一步改进EITC项目的设计。在早期统计的情况下，目标是提出新的方法和产品，这些方法和产品可以在以后被美国国税局或其他政府机构的收入统计部门采用，以向公众提供更高质量和及时的收入统计。这项NSF拨款申请背后的一个更广泛的目标是促进斯堪的纳维亚国家等最先进国家为研究目的访问数据的经验，以改善美国等目前研究访问受限的国家的数据访问。

Inequality and Taxation: Evidence from Data, Experiments, and Tax Policy VariationIncome inequality has increased sharply in the United States, as well as in many OECD countries in recent decades. Therefore, it is valuable to develop better and more timely measures of inequality to enlighten the policy debate. Tax and transfer policy can potentially play a key role in curbing inequality. Therefore, it is valuable to understand the rise in inequality affects the public preferences for more redistribution through taxes and transfers, and estimate the economic costs of increasing redistribution through taxes and transfers. The objective of this proposal is to use administrative data as well as experimental data to make progress on those questions in four related contexts. (1) Use population tax return data posted in real time on Internal Revenue Service (IRS) databases to create early but accurate distributional statistics that could be produced almost one year earlier than current final statistics published by the Statistics of Income division of IRS, (2) Use a randomized survey experiment to analyze the effects of providing interactive information about the US income distribution on preferences for redistribution through progressive taxation and political involvement, (3) Use population US tax return data and geographical variation in knowledge about gaming the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to evaluate the real labor supply responses to the EITC and the efficiency costs of the program, (4) Use Danish population tax and migration administrative data to evaluate the effects of a special tax scheme offering a time limited low income tax rate to highly compensated foreigners migrating to Denmark. The potential intellectual merit of the proposed activity is to significantly advance our knowledge in the analysis of inequality and taxation. Such an understanding is crucial to evaluate the costs and benefits of government tax and transfer policies and hence to help policy makers design better tax and transfer systems. The proposal offers four innovative research designs in order to make progress on this question. There is relatively little work that credibly identifies the effects of inequality on preferences for redistribution. Our proposed randomized survey experiment is an innovative way to use new online survey technology that can provide randomized treatments and collect information about preferences for redistribution at relatively low cost. The effect of information on behavioral responses to taxation has hardly been explored before and could be a significant determinant to the size of such behavioral responses. If such effects are large, the government could increase information of programs designed to promote certain behaviors at a modest cost. The Earned Income Tax Credit information project offers a great opportunity to make progress in that direction. The issue of tax induced migration is looming large in public policy debates both within the European Union but also across US states. There is remarkably little evidence in the literature about this issue. The Danish special tax scheme offers a promising avenue to break new ground in this important but under-explored issue. The broader impact resulting from the proposed activity is to develop a model for partnerships between government statistical agencies (the Danish statistical agency and the Statistics of Income division of the IRS) and researchers that could be fruitful both for advancing scientific knowledge but also for improving the design and the practical implementation of tax and transfer policies. In the case of the EITC project, lessons from our research could be used to further improve the design of the EITC program. In the case of the early statistics, the goal is to propose new methods and products that could later on be adopted by the Statistics of Income division of IRS or other government agencies to provide higher quality and timely income statistics to the public. A broader goal behind this NSF grant application is to promote the experiences for data access for research purposes from the most advanced countries such as Scandinavian countries in order to improve data access in countries such as the United States where access for research is currently more restricted.