The paper provides an analysis of cyclically-adjusted budget balances of local governments in Italy for the period 2002-07. We find that local government balances appear to be relatively sensitive to the business cycle. In particular, a shock of 1 per cent in GDP changes their resources by...

The paper traces recent developments in local real estate taxation in Italy. We exploit a rich dataset at both aggregate and individual level to estimate the variation in local taxes on first homes in the last three years and the redistributive impact of the adoption of the tax on indivisible...

This paper examines the creation of some new provinces in Italy in the 1990s to assess whether the reduction in the size of the local jurisdiction led to benefits in terms of local development, human capital and road quality, which are three public goods provided by the Italian provinces in...

The European Union�s VAT system has become vulnerable to organised fraud schemes. In recent years, these schemes, undergoing a change in structure, have affected services and imports of goods from third countries and may also have shifted trade in goods among EU countries. Within the EU-27,...

In this paper we use data from the Bank of Italy�s Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) to study what Italian households think of tax evasion, and to estimate their propensity to evade taxes. This propensity turns out to be larger for the self-employed than for employees; within the...

Tax evasion is a widespread phenomenon and encouraging tax compliance is an important and much debated policy issue. Many studies have shown that tax cheating has to be attributed to a considerable extent to the tax morale of taxpayers. The aim of the present paper is to shed light on the...

We contribute to the debate on how to assess the size of the underground or shadow economy with a reinterpretation of the traditional Currency Demand Approach (CDA) � la Tanzi. We introduce three main innovations. First, we take as dependent variable in the money demand equation a direct...

In this paper we argue that tax enforcement is an additional contextual factor affecting tax morale, one of the most important determinants of tax compliance. By using a unique dataset that merges a representative sample of Italian households with administrative data on tax enforcement, we find...

The paper surveys different approaches to the estimation of the underground economy. First, the focus is on the methodologies adopted by the Italian and French Statistical Institutes, respectively based on the exhaustive estimate of the labour input and on tax compliance data. Secondly, we...

This study retraces the history of tax compliance in Italy from unification to today. We review the attempts at evaluating the gap between actual and potential tax revenue, from nineteenth-century descriptive statistics up until the formal estimates of recent decades, which distinguish lawful...