Joel Slemrod et al. have a great old paper called April 15 Syndrome, where they examine, among other things, how much people lose by not filing their taxes earlier if they are due a refund (about a billion dollars a year, back in 1988 when interest rates were a bit higher), or how much they lose by sending in tax payments earlier than legally required (about 46 million dollars).
I recently saw an interesting graph:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=file%20my%20taxes,where%20is%20my%20refund
It overlays the Google searches for “file my taxes” with “where is my refund”. It appears that there are two spikes for searches for “file my taxes”—those that file early in the filing season, and those that file just before the deadline. However, there is only one spike for “where is my refund”—a couple weeks following the first “file my taxes” spike. There is very little action on “where is my refund” following the second “file my taxes” spike, which would be consistent with that group of people, on average, being less likely to receive, or less interested in when they receive, their refunds. While Joel et al’s paper shows that people certainly do file for refunds later than one might hope (at least they did in 1988), this shows us that those that do this are much less worried about when their payments come, or at least less likely to search Google for information about when those refunds come, suggesting their discount rates may be lower than average, they may be less financially constrained, etc.
Personally, I filed within a few days of April 15 this year, and got a refund.
