National Tax Journal articles from December 2006

National Tax Journal archives from December 2006

Beggar thy neighbor? Property taxation of vacation homes.
December 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION According to the U.S. Census, as of 1999 there were approximately 3.6 million vacation homes in the United States. Vacation homes constitute just over three percent of all housing units in the United States, with 14 states...

Labor supply effects of the earned income tax credit: evidence from Wisconsin's supplemental benefit for families with three children.
December 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is the largest federal means-tested antipoverty program in the United States. Federal EITC tax expenditures in 1999 were $31 billion, almost as much as for the Food Stamp and Temporary...

Audit certainty, audit productivity, and taxpayer compliance.
December 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION Evasion is a pervasive problem in all tax systems. For example, the tax gap in the United States individual income tax--or the amount of income taxes not collected due to noncompliance---is currently estimated by the Internal...

Do audits enhance compliance? An empirical assessment of VAT enforcement.
December 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION Tax administrations spend large amounts of their resources in monitoring and controlling tax evasion. Is it worth it? What is the role of institutional enforcement in enhancing compliance? This paper analyzes the effects of...

Systematic risk and the muni puzzle.
December 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION The municipal bond market provides economists with unique opportunities to study the effects of taxes on security prices. The coupons received from most municipal bonds are exempt from Federal tax, while the coupons received...

Profit tax evasion under oligopoly with endogenous market structure.
December 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION A firm's decision to evade taxes may be separable from its activity choice. This separability feature has important implications since, for example, the neutrality of a profit tax is preserved in the presence of tax evasion...

VAT fraud and evasion: what do we know and what can be done?
December 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION The key claim made by advocates of the value-added tax (VAT) is that it is a particularly effective way of raising tax revenue. Cnossen (1990), for example, argues that "purely from a revenue point of view, VAT is probably the...

Coordinating federal and provincial sales taxes: lessons from the Canadian experience.
December 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION Is it possible to coordinate a federal value-added tax (VAT) with state retail sales taxes (RSTs)? Canada's experience over the last 15 years demonstrates that it is. Must sub-national governments harmonize retail sales taxes...

Is the VAT a money machine?
December 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION "Some panelists were... concerned that introducing a VAT would lead to higher total tax collections over time and facilitate the development of a larger federal government--in other words, that the VAT would be a 'money...

Implementing a progressive consumption tax: advantages of adopting the VAT credit-method system.(Forum: The Value-Added Tax)
December 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION One of the most basic questions in the perennial debate on fundamental tax reform in the United States is whether the federal government should tax income, consumption, or both. Advocates of consumption taxes variously hope...