We present an experimental study on the wasted resources associated with tax evasion. This waste arises from taxpayers and tax authorities, investing costly effort in concealment, respectively detect ion, of tax evasion. We show that (socially inefficient) efforts depend positively on the...

We study experimentally how taxpayers choose between two tax regimes to fund a public good. The first-best tax regime imposes a general, distorsion-free income tax. However, this tax cannot be enforced. The second-best alternative supplements the income tax by a specific commodity tax. This tax...

In an overlapping generations-experiment with multiple families participants can either support their parents directly and thereby reduce their tax burden or hope for tax-financed old age support. State productivity is captured by the factor with which total tax revenues are multiplied to...

We consider a society composed of two regions. Each of them provides a public good whose benefits reach beyond local boundaries. In case of decentralization, taxes collected by members of a region are spent only on that region's public good. In case of centralization, tax receipts from the two...

The workforce in all industrialized countries is aging. To forecast future challenges, it is important to understand the impact of a worker's age on the labor market. In this paper, we analyze whether older workers in Germany and Norway are treated differently in the hiring process. Students and...

This paper examines the relationship between firm births and job creation in Great Britain. We use a new data set for 60 British regions, covering the whole of Great Britain, between 1980 and 1998. The relationship between new-firm startups and employment growth has previously been examined...

The paper makes three contributions to the economics literature on entrepreneurship. We offer a new measure of entrepreneurship which accounts for variations in persistence in self-employment. We outline an econometric methodology to account for this approach and find that it is superior to...

Skill-biased technical change has occupied empirical economists for much of the 90s. However, the empirical literature has not progressed much beyond observing a positive correlation between technology indicators and demand shifts. Two hypotheses on the root causes of skill biases in technical...

This study aims at explaining female and male entrepreneurship across countries. Explanatory variables are derived from three streams of literature, including the literature on the determinants of entrepreneurship, the literature on female labor force participation, and that on female...

Using decomposition analysis, the paper investigates the reasons why Northern England has less but higher performing self-employed businesses than the South. It finds the causes are mainly structural differences rather than due to regional variation in people's characteristics. The paper also...