a given tax will impose a greater deadweight loss when:,

A given tax will impose a greater deadweight loss when it is more complex. This blog post explores the complexity of a tax and how that impacts its deadweight loss. This deadweight loss is measured by the marginal cost of administrating a tax. A higher level of complexity means that more resources are needed in order to understand and comply with the requirements, which creates a greater opportunity for people to make mistakes or take advantage. – Complexity can be boiled down to two main categories: legal complexity, and economic (or behavioral) complexity. Legal complexity refers to how many laws or regulations there are on any given topic; this includes court decisions as well as rules from administrative agencies like U.S. Customs & Border Protection Economic or behavioral complexity looks at whether these rules have an impact on individuals’ behavior – so if they do, it has high levels of both types of complexity;