Behavioral Responses to Taxation and Inequality: Evidence from Policy Variation Using Administrative Data

本项目旨在了解税收和转移支付是否可以成为解决收入不平等问题的有效工具，以及它们如何影响美国和州一级的经济。调查人员使用来自美国国税局的行政数据来分析税收和转移对不平等和经济活动的影响。拟议的活动将大大提高我们对不平等、税收和转移的分析知识。这种理解对于评估政府税收和转移支付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支付制度。这项研究还将为政府统计机构（美国财政部税收分析办公室和美国国税局收入统计部门）和研究人员之间的伙伴关系开发一个模式，这不仅可以促进科学知识的发展，还可以改善税收和转移政策的设计和实际实施。在加州劳动所得税抵免（EITC）项目的案例中，研究的经验教训可以用于进一步改进EITC计划的设计。最后，研究人员通过开发一种新工具“分配国民账户”，将经济增长的衡量与不平等的衡量结合起来。这个新工具有可能为当前关于不平等的辩论提供信息。具体而言，本研究使用行政数据分析了四种相关背景下对税收和不平等的行为反应：(1)评估2013年收入分配顶部增税对收入报告、避税和经济活动的影响；(2)评估2015年加州EITC对单亲家庭逃税和劳动力供给的影响；(3)评估各州所得税和遗产税对美国各州个人流动性的影响；(4)将美国纳税申报数据与国民账户数据相结合，创建分配国民账户，以便将国民会计分析与不平等分析相结合，并能够提供美国社会经济群体对整体经济增长分布的统计数据。前三个项目提供创新的研究设计，利用税收政策变化分析大量行政数据，而最后一个项目旨在向公众提供更好的分配统计数据，帮助弥合经济增长分析与不平等分析之间的差距。

This project aims at understanding whether taxes and transfers can be effective tools to address income inequality, and how they affect the economy both at the US level and the state level. The investigators use administrative data from IRS returns to analyze the effects of taxes and transfers on both inequality and economic activity. The proposed activity will significantly advance our knowledge in the analysis of inequality, taxes, and transfers. Such an understanding is crucial to evaluate the costs and benefits of government tax and transfer policies and hence help policy makers design better tax and transfer systems. This research will also develop a model for partnerships between government statistical agencies (the office of Tax Analysis of the US Treasury 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 California Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) project, lessons from the research could be used to further improve the design of the EITC program. Lastly, the investigators integrate the measurement of economic growth with the measurement of inequality by developing a new tool "Distributional National Accounts". This new tool has the potential to inform the current debate on inequality.Specifically, this research uses administrative data to analyze behavioral responses to taxation and inequality in four related contexts: (1) evaluate the effects of the 2013 tax increases at the top of the distribution on income reporting, tax avoidance, and economic activity; (2) evaluate the 2015 California EITC on both tax evasion and labor supply of single parents; (3) evaluate the effects of state income and inheritances taxes on the mobility of individuals across US states; (4) combine US tax return data with National account data to create Distributional National Accounts in order to integrate national accounting analysis with inequality analysis and be able to provide statistics on the distribution of overall economic growth by socio-economic groups in the United States. The first three projects offer innovative research designs analyzing large administrative data using tax policy variations, while the last project aims at offering better distributional statistics to the public that can help bridge the gap between the analysis of economic growth and inequality analysis.