The 12th Annual Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum concludes today at Stanford:

The Forum’s objective is to encourage the work of young scholars by providing experience in the pursuit of scholarship and the nature of the scholarly exchange. Meetings are held each spring, at Yale one year and Stanford the next.

Between twelve and twenty scholars (with one to seven years in teaching and who are not yet tenured) are chosen on a blind basis from among those submitting papers to present. Two senior scholars, not necessarily from Stanford or Yale, comment on each paper. The audience will include the invited young scholars, faculty from the host institutions, and invited guests. The goal is discourse on both the merits of particular papers and on appropriate methodologies for doing work in that genre. We hope that comment and discussion will communicate what counts as good work among successful senior scholars and will also challenge and improve the standards that now exist. The Forum also hopes to increase the sense of community among American legal scholars generally, particularly among new and veteran professors.

Here are the tax papers (with commentary by Joseph Bankman and Dan Kessler (both of Stanford)):

• Brian D. Galle (Boston College), The Distortionary Effects of Subsidies for Charity in a Federal System:

Prevailing accounts of the efficiency of subsidies for the nonprofit sector presume that the only alternative source of public goods is a single sovereign, controlled by a single median voter. Tiebout sorting, however, also provides citizens with alternative bundles of public goods. When these two systems are in place simultaneously, they may interact. We present a model in which subsidies may affect not only the choice between nonprofit and government, but also the choice among governments. Because nonprofits allow citizens to obtain alternative bundles of public goods without relocation, subsidies for the nonprofit sector alter incentives to relocate. We show that this distortion in the market for local government may either increase or decrease welfare, depending on the nature and geographical scope of the good provided. As a result, for some goods it is ambiguous whether subsidies for charity on net increase social welfare. We also consider extensions involving simultaneous provision of similar goods of differing quality.

• Sarah Lawsky (UC-Irvine), Modeling Tax Law’s Uncertainty:

This article presents a formal model of tax compliance that, unlike other models of tax compliance, takes into account that the decision of whether to comply with the tax law is a decision under uncertainty. That is, a taxpayer deciding whether to comply faces a series of unknown probabilities: he does not know, for example, the probability that he will be selected for audit, the probability that the government will identify a particular questionable tax position, or the probability that this position will ultimately be struck down. The model presented incorporates both the extent of a taxpayer’s uncertainty and the taxpayer’s attitude toward uncertainty, and thus casts new light on controversial questions in tax compliance, such as how to structure penalties and whether to penalize tax advisors.