Jonathan Choi (Minnesota; Google Scholar) presents Subjective Prices of Tax Compliance (with Ariel Jurow Kleiman (Loyola-LA; Google Scholar)) at UC-San Francisco right this moment as a part of its Tax Coverage Colloquium hosted by Manoj Viswanathan:

This Article introduces and estimates “subjective prices” of tax compliance, that are prices of tax compliance that individuals expertise straight and individually. To measure these prices, we carried out a survey experiment assessing how a lot taxpayers would pay to scale back the unpleasantness related to submitting a tax return. The experiment revealed that taxpayers are extra involved about inadvertent errors of their tax filings than by the point spent on compliance. Respondents additionally solely ascribed significant worth to eliminating all tax compliance work; they ascribed basically no worth to marginal time financial savings. Moreover, eliminating tax compliance time for high-income taxpayers and taxpayers with complicated returns shouldn’t be price rather more than eliminating tax compliance time for low-income taxpayers with easy returns.

These findings have essential implications for concept and coverage. From a theoretical perspective, these survey outcomes name into query the almost common observe of utilizing market wages to monetize the time that individuals spend on tax compliance work.