The Future of Tax Research: A Mostly Economics Perspective

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Tax research is an active area of academic inquiry across the disciplines of accounting, economics, and law. The title for this paper comes from the title of a session at the February 2006 meeting of the American Tax Association. The session brought together researchers from these three disciplines to prognosticate on the future of tax research. To me, the charge of thinking about the ‘‘future of tax research’’ brought to mind two distinct questions. First, given the multidisciplinary aspect of tax research, how will it evolve over time? Second, what are the important unanswered questions about taxation that I would like researchers (hopefully from all disciplines) to work on over the next decade? I have structured this paper to address each of these questions. I start with a brief exercise in ‘‘cultural anthropology’’ with some comments on how the different disciplines approach tax research and, for economics, how tax research fits into the broader spectrum of economic research. An understanding of these differences may help foster increased interaction across the disciplines. The second part of the paper offers a short ‘‘Greatest Hits’’ list from the perspective of economics on what the major unanswered tax questions are. Creating such a list naturally depends on one’s own background and biases. As an empiricist, I tend to focus on empirically oriented questions. Furthermore, federal, rather than state or local, tax issues dominate my list, which is a reflection more of my interests than the relative importance of the areas of research.