Sara Closs-Davies, Dominic de Cogan and Andy Lymer

We are delighted to deliver a dedicated research blog for the Tax Research Network.  We love reading blogs, and like many of you, we subscribe to various tax blogs including the Kluwer International Tax Blog, the Oxford Centre for Business Taxation Blogs, Tax Watch, Tax Justice UK and the Tax Prof Blog amongst others.  We are also avid readers of blogs that touch on tax such as those from the IFS and the Resolution Foundation. Nevertheless, we have long believed that there is room for a more generalist outlet for tax research, which can be used to showcase the exceptionally rich variety of high-quality scholarship pursued by TRN members.  None of the current blogs, wonderful though they are, offer this breadth of material or opportunities to our members.

As attendees of our conferences will know, our members include tax professionals, civil servants, businesspeople and academics from a range of jurisdictions, and we research and apply our expertise in a wide range of fields including accounting, sociology, social policy, law, economics and history.  We aim to represent this wide variety of work carried out by TRN members in this new Blog series under the TRN banner and to provide a natural home for thoughtful contributions on topical and more specialist fields of research alike.  

We intend to continue to publish a new post on the blog on a regular basis, and we are pleased to already have an exciting series of posts available for you to read, listed at https://taxresearch.network/category/blog (note: you can also find this blog list page by hovering over the ‘blog’ link in the menu – it’s the second option in the list that drops down).

Get involved! We welcome submissions on tax and adjacent topics from all academics and TRN members.  We are particularly committed to supporting early career researchers who are either pursuing a research degree or are in the first stages of an academic career.

Further information on how to submit can be found at https://taxresearch.network/blog-contributor-guidelines/, but the key points are that posts should be under 2,000 words long including footnotes and that the usual standards of academic citation should be observed.  It is also worth considering whether your submission will be accessible to a non-specialist audience, as we hope that this Blog will be widely read amongst interdisciplinary researchers, policymakers, journalists, practitioners, educators and others.  

We hope that blogposts will ignite meaningful and interesting conversations about tax.  For now, comments will be turned off, but we will be publishing links to new posts on social media and very much encourage engagement with them on Twitter and elsewhere.  Last but not least, a very warm welcome from us if you ae new to our Blog, and thanks to our existing bloggers for helping us make this happen. We hope that you enjoy the contributions made so far as much as we have.

This series is edited by Dr Sara Closs Davies and Dominic de Cogan on behalf of the TRN.