112th Annual Conference Saturday Afternoon Short Course

The Saturday Afternoon Short Course sponsored by the University of Michigan Office of Tax Policy Research entitled The Behavioral Economics of Taxation, will be led by Alex Rees-Jones, Associate Professor of Economics, Cornell University. It will run from 1:00 to 2:30 pm, on Saturday, November 23.

This short course will summarize recent developments in the integration of behavioral economics into public finance. Two specific focuses will be (1) approaches to building psychology and limited rationality into our framework for assessing the welfare costs of taxation, and (2) evidence on the psychological determinants of tax compliance.

For a short review paper providing some useful background for the course, see: Rees-Jones, A. and Taubinsky, D. (2018), “Taxing Humans: Pitfalls of the Mechanism Design Approach and Potential Resolutions”, Tax Policy and the Economy, Vol. 32.