In this paper, we provide empirical evidence for the influence of income taxes on the choice of residence of taxpayers at the local level. The fact that Swiss communities can individually set tax multipliers thereby shifting the progressive tax scheme which is fixed at the cantonal (state) level...

Tax competition is discussed as a source of inefficiency in international taxation and in fiscal federalism. Two preconditions for the existence of such effects of tax competition are that mobile fac-tors locate or reside in jurisdictions with ? ceteris paribus ? lower tax rates and that taxes...

Research rankings based on publications and citations today dominate governance of academia. Yet they have unintended side effects on individual scholars and academic institutions and can be counterproductive. They induce a substitution of the "taste for science" by a "taste for publication". We...

Academic rankings today are the backbone of research governance, which seem to fit the aims of "new public management" on the one side and the idea of the "republic of science" on the other side. Nevertheless rankings recently came under scrutiny. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of...

This paper addresses the personal linkages between the public administration and the legislature that emerge because public servants pursue a political mandate. There are concerns that the strong representation of bureaucrats in many Western parliaments compromises the constitutionally proposed...

We compare the votes of parliamentary representatives and their constituents on a popular initiative that directly aimed at weakening the separation of powers in 1922 in Switzerland. We analyze whether the strength of individual ties to the public service affect the probability of voting for the...

Improving transparency and enabling the principal to hold its agents accountable is a major issue in any principal agent relationship. This paper focuses on the role of public auditors in this task and presents evidence on the impact of auditor term length and term limits on government...

In recent years much research has investigated whether values, social norms, and attitudes differ across countries and whether these differences have measurable effects on economic behavior. One area in which such studies are particularly relevant is tax compliance, given both the noted...

This paper analyses the impact of direct democracy, trust in government, the court and the legal system, and federalism on tax morale. In the tax compliance literature it is novel to analyse tax morale as dependent variable and to systematically analyse the effects of formal and informal...

The paper explores whether a social learning model helps explain the observed conformity and compliance with social norms after the unification of Germany. We compare tax morale, (the willingness to pay taxes), between inhabitants of East and West Germany during the post-unification period,...