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

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，美国和许多经合组织国家的收入不平等急剧增加。因此，有必要制定更好、更及时的不平等衡量标准，以启发政策辩论。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，有必要了解不平等的加剧会影响公众对通过税收和转移支付进行更多再分配的偏好，并估计通过税收和转移支付增加再分配的经济成本。 本提案的目的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)使用国内税收署（IRS）数据库中真实的时间公布的人口纳税申报表数据，以创建早期但准确的分布统计数据，这些数据可以比IRS收入统计司公布的当前最终统计数据提前近一年产生，（二）使用随机调查实验，通过以下方式分析提供有关美国收入分配的互动信息对再分配偏好的影响：累进税和政治参与，（3）使用美国人口纳税申报数据和关于游戏所得税抵免（EITC）的知识的地理差异来评估EITC的真实的劳动力供应反应和计划的效率成本，（四）使用丹麦人口税和移民管理数据，评估提供有时间限制的低收入税率的特别税收计划的影响，移民到丹麦的高报酬外国人。拟议活动的潜在智力价值是大大提高我们在分析不平等和税收方面的知识。这种了解对于评估政府税收和转移政策的成本和效益，从而帮助决策者设计更好的税收和转移制度至关重要。该提案提出了四项创新研究设计，以便在这一问题上取得进展。相对而言，很少有研究能够清晰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式，使用新的在线调查技术，可以提供随机处理，并以相对较低的成本收集有关再分配偏好的信息。信息对税收行为反应的影响以前几乎没有被探讨过，这可能是这种行为反应大小的重要决定因素。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计划的信息。所得税抵免信息项目为在这方面取得进展提供了一个很好的机会。税收引发的移民问题在欧盟内部和美国各州的公共政策辩论中都显得很重要。关于这个问题的文献证据非常少。丹麦的特别税收计划为在这一重要但探讨不足的问题上开辟新的道路提供了一个有希望的途径。拟议活动产生的更广泛影响是，为政府统计机构（丹麦统计局和国税局收入统计司）与研究人员之间的伙伴关系制定一个模式，这一模式可能会在促进科学知识以及改进税收和转移政策的设计和实际执行方面取得丰硕成果。在EITC项目的情况下，我们的研究经验教训可以用来进一步改善EITC计划的设计。在早期统计的情况下，目标是提出新的方法和产品，稍后可由IRS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数据。NSF资助申请背后的一个更广泛的目标是推广斯堪的纳维亚国家等最先进国家为研究目的获取数据的经验，以改善美国等国家的数据获取，这些国家目前对研究的获取更为限制。

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.