Adding to the literature on the effects of government decentralization, this paper uses a large sample of individual responses from more than a hundred countries about public's perceptions of government's performance along various dimensions to study the relative influences of different types of...

The paper surveys the characteristics of the common European VAT system, proposed by the EU-Commission to overcome the weaknesses of the transitional European VAT system, which was enacted in 1993 and is still in force. We argue that a harmonized VAT rate will generate substantial costs for EU...

The standard model of tax evasion based on the subjective expected utility maximization does not perform particularly well in econometric analyses: it predicts too little evasion and produces unsatisfactory econometric parameter estimates. The model is extended by looking at how the tax...

This paper highlights the difference between statutory and effective tax rates in the value added tax in China, and explores the role of administrative discretion in generating this difference. In China, unlike in Europe where the VAT originated, there can be significant differences between...

This paper presents a new methodology to detect corruption in customs and applies it to Madagascar’s main port. Manipulation of assignment of import declarations to inspectors is identified by measuring deviations from random assignment prescribed by official rules. Deviant declarations are...

We investigate whether investment incentives work in less developed countries by exploiting the introduction of accelerated depreciation (AD) for fixed asset investment in China as a natural experiment. In contrast to the large positive impact of similar tax incentives in the U.S. and U.K. found...

Tax compliance has been studied in economics by analysing the individual decision of a representative person between paying and evading taxes. A neglected aspect of tax compliance is the interaction of taxpayers and tax authorities. The relationship between the two actors can be understood as an...

Several recent studies suggest that equalizing transfers in a federal system may distort the tax policy decisions of states. We study this issue for the German federal fiscal system. In a simple theoretical model, we first identify a substitution and an income effect of equalizing transfers. Our...

The Norwegian Tax Administration operated multi-year random audits of personal income tax returns. We exploit this exceptional randomized setup to estimate the effects of tax audits on future compliance explicitly distinguishing between dynamic responses of compliant and noncompliant audited...