The objective of this paper is to empirically study if and to what extent people legally reduce their tax payments. There are few empirical studies of tax avoidance although avoidance may seriously affect the possibilities to raise tax revenue. I use a sample of Swedish siblings receiving...

Several contributions in the optimal taxation literature have emphasized that, when individuals’ preferences are not separable between leisure and other goods, it is desirable to supplement a nonlinear income tax with public provision of private goods. Moreover, it has also been shown that the...

Several countries practice a system where laymen, who lack legal education, participate in the judicial decision making. Yet, little is known about their potential influence on the court rulings. In Sweden lay judges (namndeman) are affiliated with the political parties and appointed in...

The objective of this paper is to describe two new administrative Swedish databases, referred to as the Belinda databases. Together, these databases contain the most detailed individual-level data on estates, bequests, and inheritances currently available. We present descriptive statistics for...

This paper offers an explanation to why the general observation that elderly hold stronger moral attitudes than young ones may be an age rather than a cohort effect. We apply mechanisms from social psychology to explain how personal norms may evolve over the life cycle. We assume that people...

This paper offers an explanation to why the general observation that elderly hold stronger moral attitudes than young ones may be an age rather than a cohort effect. We apply mechanisms from social psychology to explain how personal norms may evolve over the life cycle. We assume that people...

The objective of this paper is to study if taxpayers behave in a loss averse manner when filing their tax returns. This is important for tax design but also for understanding human behavior in general. The predictions of prospect theory can be contrasted to those of expected utility theory. We...

The objective of this paper is to study if taxpayers behave in a loss averse manner when filing their tax returns. This is important for tax design but also for understanding human behavior in general. The predictions of prospect theory can be contrasted to those of expected utility theory. We...

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...

While examining the macroeconomic effects of increased government control of the informal sector, this paper develops a two-sector general equilibrium model featuring matching frictions, and heterogeneous workers in terms of moral. This facilitates an analysis of how wage setting and...