Ownership of small businesses can facilitate upward mobility through the income hierarchy and help individuals maintain a place at the higher end of the income distribution hierarchy. This paper compares the positional stability of owners of small businesses with that of wage earners, arguing...

The literature provides ambiguous results on the effect of taxes on businesses’ choice of organizational form, partly due to a lack of good firm-level data. Our micro data covers the full population of non-financial Norwegian corporations over ten years. During this period, the dual income tax...

This essay critically revisits the roles and influences of tax havens in the world economy. It combines various massages of available studies in one scheme, documents a number of observations, and proposes several issues for future research.

We sketch a model according to which tax havens attract corporate income generated in corrupted countries. In our framework, tax havens have two opposite effects on welfare. First, tax havens’ services have a positive effect on welfare through encouraging investment by firms fearing...

A strictly risk-averse manager makes joint decisions on a firm's tax payments and book profit declarations according to accounting standards. It is analysed how the incentives to overpay or evade taxes and to inflate book profits are influenced by (1) the composition of the manager's...

Self-employed individuals have arguably greater opportunities than wage earners to underreport their incomes. The incentives for underreporting should be especially strong in an economy with generally high taxes. This paper uses recent income and expenditure data to examine the extent of...

Firms may evade taxes on profits and can also avoid fulfilling legal restrictions on production activities by bribing bureaucrats. It is shown that the existence of tax evasion does not affect corruption activities at the firm level, while the budgetary repercussions of tax evasion induce less...

This paper analyzes the impact of the Austrian Regional Extended Benefit Program (REBP) on the labor market outcomes for elderly workers in Austria. The REBP extended entitlement to regular unemployment benefits from 30 weeks to a maximum of 209 weeks for elderly individuals in certain regions....

This paper provides evidence of efficient taxation of groups with heterogeneous levels of ‘tax morale’. We set up an optimal income tax model where high tax morale implies a high subjective cost of evading taxes. The model predicts that ‘nice guys finish last’: groups with higher tax...

The literature on estimating macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy requires suitable instruments to identify exogenous and unanticipated spending shocks. So far, the instrument of choice has been military build-ups. This instrument, however, largely limits the analysis to the US as few other...