Policymakers often propose strict enforcement strategies to fight the shadow economy and to increase tax morale. However, there is also a bottom-up approach: decentralizing the political power to those who are close to the problems and give them a direct political say. This paper analyses the...

The literature on volunteering has strongly increased over the last few years. However, there is still a lack of substantial empirical evidence on the determinants of environmental participation. This empirical study analyses a cross-section of individuals using micro-data from the World Values...

The intention of this paper is to analyse how audit courts and local autonomy affect political discussion, controlling in a multivariate analysis for a broad variety of potential factors focusing on Switzerland, due to its variety of audit court competences and its strong decentralised...

Research evidence on the impact of relative income position on individuals’ attitudes and behaviour is sorely lacking. Therefore, using the International Social Survey Programme 1998 data from 26 countries this paper investigates the impact of relative income on 14 measurements of social...

We explore whether environmental motivation affects environmental behavior by focusing on volunteering. The paper first introduces a theoretical model of volunteering in environmental organizations. In a next step, it tests the hypothesis working a large micro data set covering 32 countries from...

Many studies have established that people care a great deal about their relative economic position and not solely, as standard economic theory assumes, about their absolute economic position. However, behavioral evidence is rare. This paper provides an empirical analysis on how...

Considerable evidence suggests that enforcement efforts cannot fully explain the high degree of tax compliance. To resolve this puzzle of tax compliance several researchers have argued that citizens’ attitudes toward paying taxes defined as tax morale helps to explain the high degree of...

Government accountability through electoral engagement, involvement and participation in the political debate can affect government performance. Using data for the full sample of Swiss cantons over the 1981–2001 period, this paper provides empirical evidence that government accountability...

This paper investigates the relative impact of regional energy production on the legislative choices of Russian Duma deputies on energy regulation between 1994 and 2003. We apply Poole’s optimal classification method of roll call votes using an ordered probit model to explain energy law...

Using information collected from American Economic Review publications of the last 100 years, we try to provide answers to various questions: Which are the top AER publishing institutions and countries? Which are the top AER papers based on citation success? How frequently is someone able to...