The main purpose of this paper is to provide an assessment of the impact of the introduction of an alternative minimum tax (AMT) in Belgium with a focus on the impact on various distortions margins. In the process, we provide an up-to date account of the state of effective corporate taxation in...

We model the link between inequality and excessive risk taking. In the presence of increasing returns to tax avoidance, the middle class is willing to take non rewarded financial risk despite risk aversion. Electoral pressure may lead an incumbent politician to endorse this excessive risk taking...

The success or failure of the fight against tax havens is the outcome of a coordination game between a tax haven and its potential investors. Key determinants are the costly international pressure and the haven country's revenue pool. The latter is determined endogenously by the decisions of...

We study the effects of patriotism on tax compliance. If individuals feel a (random) patriotic warm glow from honest tax compliance, this has implications for optimal auditing and tax compliance. A higher expected warm glow reduces the government's optimal audit probability and yields higher tax...

The objective of this paper is to understand the determinants of the enforcement level of indirect taxation in a positive setting. We build a sequential game where individuals differing in their willingness to pay for a taxed good vote over the enforcement level. Firms then compete à la Cournot...

Three hypotheses about the nature of federal tax arrears in Russia in the second half of the 1990s are tested empirically. Tax arrears can be a result of: 1) liquidity problems in firms, 2) redistribute subsidies of the federal government, or 3) regional political resistance to federal tax...

Our survey of private manufacturing firms finds the size of hidden "unofficial" activity to be much larger in Russia and Ukraine than in Poland, Slovakia and Romania. A comparison of cross-country averages shows that managers in Russia and Ukraine face higher effective tax rates, worse official...

An emerging literature has demonstrated some unique characteristics of trade in differentiated products. This paper contributes to the literature by postulating that differentiated products may be subject to greater tariff evasion due to the difficulties associated with assessing their quality...

Conventional wisdom suggests that lobbying is the preferred mean for exerting political influence in rich countries and corruption the preferred one in poor countries. Analyses of their joint effects are understandably rare. This paper provides a theoretical framework that focus on the...

People may express their political opinion by adopting different measures of civil disobedience. Tax compliance is an example of an economic decision that may be affected by anti-goverment sentiment. We consider a model in which political opinion as well as tax compliance decisions are both...