Property taxes in developing countries are plagued by noncompliance and can exacerbate liquidity constraints. We characterize optimal enforcement and taxation policies as functions of revenue elasticities and measures of taxpayer hardship. We estimate these parameters using multiple sources of...

Despite the low levels of taxation and public good provision in Africa, I provide evidence that a large proportion of Africans prefer lower taxation and fewer public goods. This cannot be explained by standard arguments about problems of accountability, governance or state capacity. Instead I...

This paper studies individual and social motives in tax evasion. We build a simple dynamic model that incorporates these motives and their interaction. The social motives underpin the role of norms and is the source of the dynamics that we study. Our empirical analysis exploits the adoption in...

We examine two Pakistani programs to explore the role of deterrence as well as social and psychological factors in the tax compliance behavior of agents. In the first of these programs, the government began revealing income tax paid by every taxpayer in the country. The second program publicly...

Between 2020 and 2029, the IRS will fail to collect nearly $7.5 trillion of taxes it is due. It is not possible to calculate with precision how much of this "tax gap" could be collected. This paper offers a naïve approach. The analysis suggests that with feasible changes in policy, the IRS...

We use a new dataset consisting of the universe of Greek corporate tax returns matched to financial statements to study a voluntary tax compliance program for small firms. This "self-assessment" program prescribed target taxable profit margins for different types of activity. Firms that reported...

We show that the fiscal authorities of high-tax countries can lack the incentives to combat profit shifting to tax havens. Instead, they have incentives to focus their enforcement efforts on relocating profits booked by multinationals in other high-tax countries, crowding out the enforcement on...

Why do some individuals choose to evade taxes while others do not? One popular view is that some individuals cheat on their taxes because they are more dishonest, selfish, or perceive different social norms. There is, however, little direct evidence on this matter. In collaboration with the...

There is a large literature showing that the self employed underreport their income to tax authorities. In this paper, we quantify the extent to which the self employed systematically underreport their income to U.S. household surveys. To do so, we use the Engel curve describing the relationship...

Since Feldstein (1999), the most widely used method of calculating the excess burden of income taxation is to estimate the effect of tax rates on reported taxable income. This paper reevaluates the taxable income elasticity as a measure of excess burden when individuals can evade or avoid taxes....