Two experiments show that eliciting taxpayer preferences on government spending—providing taxpayer agency--increases tax compliance. We first create an income and taxation environment in a laboratory setting to test for compliance with a lab tax. Allowing a treatment group to express...

This paper employs a decomposition analysis of inequality by income source to understand and explain particular aspects of income inequality in Greece. The results suggest that entrepreneurial income is the most significant contributor to overall inequality in Greece. It is also shown that there...

The distribution of wealth is widening in many countries and with it the importance of inherited wealth. In 1974 a Labour Government came to power in the United Kingdom committed to introducing an annual wealth tax. It left office without doing so. Using the official archives of the time and...

This paper considers the impact of taxation policy on market work. On the basis of the evidence, we find that a 10 percentage point rise in the tax wedge will reduce overall labour input provided via the market by around 2 per cent of the population of working age. The tax wedge is the sum of...

We explore the impact of central government grants on local house prices in England using a panel data set of local authorities (LAs) from 2001 to 2008. Electoral targeting of grants to LAs by the incumbent national government provides an exogenous source of variation in grants that we exploit...

This paper analyzes the dynamic incentives for technology adoption under a transferable permits system, which allows for strategic trading on the permit market. Initially, firms can invest both in low-emitting production technologies and trade permits. In the model, technology adoption and...

This paper evaluates the effect of smoking bans in public places on the exposure to tobacco smoke of non-smokers and contrasts it with the effect of excise taxes. Exploiting data on cotinine - a metabolite of nicotine - as well as state and time variation in anti-smoking policies across US...

We evaluate the effectiveness of a partial credit guarantee program implemented in a large Italian region using unique microdata from a broad set of firms. Our results show that the policy was effective to the extent that it resulted in an improved financial condition for the beneficiary firms....

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The tax-payer-as-gambler (TAG) model of tax non-compliance is the classic vehicle for providing some simple insights. Under fairly general conditions this model supports the following four propositions: (1) if the rate of return to evasion is positive everyone evades tax; (2) people with higher...