Empirical Tax Research in Germany Federal Government Plans to Establish New Institute (IfeS)

Tax research is among the lively fields of empirical interaction between law and economic sciences. One of the authors' faculty supervisor in the US, Jacob Goldin, quite literally made his career off of well-designed large scale field experiments in tax compliance research such as the one published in the National Tax Journal. German legal scholars also study tax compliance using experimental methods. Yet, there is still a dearth of large-scale datasets available for empirical tax research. This is why the German government has now resolved to establish a new institute for empirical tax research called Institut für empirische Steuerforschung (IfeS). Members...