Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. The two-week OxTalks freeze period starts on Monday 2nd March. During this time, there will be no facility to publish or edit events. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period. Once Oxford Events launches, you will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
We revisit the identification of behavioral responses to tax reforms and develop a new approach that allows for graphical validation of identifying assumptions and representation of treatment effects. Considering typical tax reforms, such as a reduction in the top income tax, we show that the state-of-the-art estimation strategy relies on an assumption that trend differences in income across the income distribution remain constant in the absence of reforms. Similar to the pre-trend validation of differences-in-differences studies, this identifying assumption of constant trend differentials can be validated by comparing the evolution of income in untreated parts of the income distribution over time. We illustrate the importance of our new validation approach by studying a number of tax reforms in Denmark, and we show how violations of the identifying assumption may drive the estimates obtained from the state-of-the-art strategy