Previous research argues that law expresses social values and could, therefore, influence individual behavior independently of enforcement and penalization. Using three laboratory experiments on tax avoidance and evasion, we study how legality affects individuals' decisions. We find that,...

In the tax literature, the tax effort index for any country is usually measured by the ratio of the actual tax ratio to the predicted ratio. This reflects mainly the variance in the taxable capacity of a country. A high value of tax effort index indicates that a particular country is collecting...

Empirical evidence suggests that managerial overconfidence and government guarantees contribute substantially to excessive risk-taking in the banking industry. This paper incorporates managerial overconfidence and limited bank liability into a principal-agent model, where the bank manager...

We analyse attempts to implement personalised regulation in the form of sin licenses (O'Donoghue and Rabin 2003, 2005, 2007) to correct the distortion in the consumption of a harmful good when consumers suffer from varying degrees of self-control problems. We take into account the possibility...

We analyze personalized regulation in the form of sin licenses to correct the distortion in the consumption of a harmful good when consumers suffer from varying degrees of self-control problems. We take into account preference uncertainty, which generates a trade-off between flexibility and...

In oligopolistic industries that are unionised and may be affected by offshoring, falling offshoring costs have a moderating effect on trade unions. They will accept lower sector wages in order to discourage mobile forms from leaving the country. Since such wages are independent of the workers'...

Recent macro developments in the euro area have highlighted the interactions between fiscal policy, sovereign debt, and financial fragility. We take a structural macroeconomic model with frictions in the financial intermediation process, in line with recent research, but introduce asset choice...

We simulate the fiscal stimulus packages set up by the German government to allevi-ate the costs of the COVID-19 pandemic in a dynamic New Keynesian multi-sectorgeneral equilibrium model. We find that, cumulated over 2020-2022, output lossesrelative to steady state can be reduced by more than 4...

Using the exogenous shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, we study how informed market participants evaluate fiscal space. Short-selling activity shifted upon the onset of the pandemic towards companies with low financial flexibility only in countries with limited fiscal space. Among these companies,...

The "Great Lockdown" implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a severe world-wide economic crisis. In euro area countries, sovereign debt-to-GDP ratios are on the rise and reductions in expected fiscal surpluses raise sustainability concerns amongst investors. This paper...