This dissertation consists of three papers in Public Economics. The first chapter, joint work with Chris Goodwin, investigates the informational effect that social comparisons play in household electricity use. We employ a randomized field experiment to present individuals with a temporally disaggregated social norm that encourages them to conserve electricity by comparing their consumption to that of an ``energy efficient neighbor''. The informational effect is isolated since households in the field experiment are consumption naive, have no economic incentive to conserve, and live in near identical housing units. Utilizing smart-meter data, we find households that received our informational treatment reduced their electricity consumption by an average of 7%, even though the treatment was private and there was no financial incentive to conserve. We also discover that conservation gains are largest during the peak morning and evening hours. Based on our theoretic model and empirical results we propose the existence of an optimal placement of the social comparison to maximize the electricity conservation response and propose some methods to investigate this in future research.

In the second chapter, I explore the consequences of tax avoidance for the normative analysis of taxation. A large normative literature on taxation highlights labor supply as the mechanism used by taxpayers to circumvent taxation. However, empirical evidence shows that taxpayers use loopholes and other legal avoidance strategies to reduce their taxable income. This paper seeks to reconcile the normative theory with the empirical evidence. I introduce tax avoidance into a standard optimal taxation model by proposing an informational structure where taxpayers can pay a cost to report something other than the income they produced. This gives taxpayers multiple ways to reduce their taxable income: either by changing their labor supply, by using tax avoidance, or by using both. A central theoretical result shows that at the optimum, taxpayers' reports must equal their income. The government can thus eliminate tax avoidance while increasing tax revenues. I also find three distinct types of optimal tax solutions depending on the cost of tax avoidance. I determine which of the three is consistent with US tax returns data by estimating the cost of tax avoidance, and calculate the optimal tax schedule that is empirically relevant.

In the final chapter I continue the work of the second chapter. I show that under different assumptions for the cost of tax avoidance, the previous result that taxpayers income reports must equal their income doesn't hold. The optimal tax policy when the cost of tax avoidance is convex encourages tax avoidance for taxpayers in the middle of the income distribution. Tax avoidance allows the government to levy higher taxes on high-income taxpayers. By changing the distribution of income through tax avoidance, the government can make it more expensive for high-income taxpayers to misreport their income. Hence, tax avoidance can lead to higher tax revenues. Furthermore, tax avoidance creates a division between statutory and effective tax rates. This division implies that optimal statutory tax rates are lower than effective rates, which are the true measure of a government's redistribution ability. This suggests that the estimates of after-tax inequality and tax revenues calculated using standard models are overstated, and that governments might be more limited in providing social insurance than previously thought.