On September 15, 2023, Ass.-Prof. Harald Amberger gave a talk at this year’s Illinois Tax Symposium with the title “Tax System Complexity and Investment”. The paper is co-authored with John Gallemore from the University of North Carolina and Jaron Wilde from the University of Iowa. The authors show that tax system complexity can mute firms’ responsiveness to tax incentives (e.g., tax-rate changes), leading to ineffective tax policy.

The Illinois Tax Symposium is organized biannually by the University of Illinois and counts as one of the most prestigious conferences of the field. Two discussants (Jacob Goldin from University of Chicago Law School and John Guyton from the Internal Revenue Service IRS) provided interesting insights from law and economics as well as public administration.