TAX MINIMIZATION BY FRENCH COHABITING COUPLES.

I. INTRODUCTION This paper focuses on household decisions regarding tax filing and aims to detect nonminimizing income tax behavior among cohabiting couples with children. In France and the United States [...]
This paper examines the tax returns of French cohabiting couples with children. These couples form two separate tax units and must optimally assign their children to the tax unit of one of the parents to optimize tax rebates. We find that children are allocated in a way that minimizes tax liability in 75 percent of cohabiting households. The 25 percent of households that fail to minimize their liability appear to use heuristics, are influenced by inertia, and possibly fail to fully cooperate as suboptimal couples tend to separate more and marry less in the subsequent period. Keywords: efficiency, noncooperative model, income taxation, learning, tax returns JEL Codes: D13, D61, H31