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Examine tax-related decisions of married couples to determine whether decisions are made jointly or if one spouse dominates the decision. We also examine characteristics related to decision styles.

Questionnaires completed independently by both the husband and wife.

Nearly 40 percent of the couples make tax decisions jointly, while the remaining couples allow one spouse to dominate tax-related decisions. The results indicate that when one spouse dominates the decisions, it is most often the wife. We also find that couples are more likely to share tax-related decision responsibility jointly when the husband earns significantly more than the wife, when the couple has greater income as a family, and when they are a new couple.

Prior research has generally not recognized tax decisions by married couples as a joint decision or attempted to determine whether tax decisions are dominated by the husband or wife. This issue has implications for interpreting research results in light of prior research that has found that tax-related decisions vary significantly by gender. The finding that many couples make joint decisions suggests that an interesting avenue for future research would be to determine the nature of that joint decision making and whether it is collaborative, bargaining, or something else.

Prior research on tax-related decisions has not recognized that for approximately 40 percent of tax returns filed, the unit of study is not a single individual but a married couple.

This study examines the influence of peers in the tax compliance setting using a social learning theory approach to investigate the effect of observing a peer's likelihood of reporting income. We also examine the role that gender plays in these decisions. We ask participants to estimate the likelihood of reporting income and to make a binary compliance decision in a setting where they are able to observe what they believe is another's response to a hypothetical tax reporting scenario. Participants who viewed the decision of a noncompliant peer were less likely to report honestly than those who viewed the decision of a compliant peer. This finding provides further evidence of a potential effect for peer influence. Consistent with prior literature, we find that women are more likely to comply than men, but do not find an interactive effect with peer observation. A supplemental experiment indicated that participants who believed their responses would be seen by a peer were less likely to report honestly than participants who believed their responses would remain private. This result, although counter-intuitive, is consistent with Wenzel's (2005a) description of a self–other discrepancy and conformance to a misperceived social norm.