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...

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...

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...

In 2008 and 2014, the South African Revenue Service (SARS) did snapshot synchronizations of its business tax registry with the country's commercial register in an attempt to identify firms that are non-compliant with their obligation to register with SARS for business tax purposes. We analyse...

This paper analyzes corporate tax-related policies and the difference between them in developed and developing countries. I show that the relationship between financial development and corporate income tax rates as well as the tax administrations' effectiveness follows a U-shaped pattern, a...

This paper analyzes the effect of the removal of government guarantees on bank risk taking. We exploit the removal of guarantees for German Landesbanken which results in lower credit ratings, higher funding costs, and a loss in franchise value. This removal was announced in 2001, but...

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...