In this paper, we develop a model that can explain why governments may want to choose to offer a voluntary disclosure program that allows people who withheld taxes to turn themselves in without punishment. We find that such a leniency rule not only increases government revenue when it comes as a...

We study the phenomenon of tax evasion using a simple signaling model, in which the signal is taxpayer's reported income. The novelty of our approach lies in the way we define honesty. Specifically, we advocate the view that there are no absolutely honest taxpayers: all taxpayers may under...

We analyze a client's choice of contract in auctions where Dutch law firms compete for routine cases. The distinguishing feature here is that lawyers may submit bids with any fee arrangement they prefer: an hourly rate, a fixed fee or a mixed fee, which is a time-capped fixed fee plus an hourly...

The main goal of this study is two-fold: (1) to provide a general overview of thecontributions to the literature on the informal sector, with a special focus on the PublicChoice approach; and (2) to compare these contributions across two institutionallydifferent types of countries: developed and...

We provide evidence from a large-scale field experiment on the causal effects of audit rules on compliance in a market for long-term care. In this setting care should be provided quickly and, therefore, the gatekeeper introduced ex-post auditing. Our results do not show significant effects of...

In this paper, we test empirically whether there is a relationship between corporate income taxes and CEO bonus payments. Using Compustat and ExecuComp data from 1992 to 2010, we find mixed results. Looking at the whole sample, the average bonus contract rewards tax savings excessively in...

This paper presents suggestive evidence of income shifting in response to differences in corporate tax rates for a large selection of OECD countries. We use a new method to disentangle the income shifting effects from the effects of tax rates on real activity. Our baseline estimates suggest that...

A series of experiments in Albania and the Netherlands give us the opportunity to compare behavioral patterns related to tax evasion. Subjects have to decide between a random 'registered' income, the realization of which will be known to the experimenter for sure, and a random 'unregistered'...

This paper provides evidence that keiretsu group member firms are subject to lowereffective tax rates than independent firms in Japan. As one explanation for this phenomenon, wedevelop a hypothesis that keiretsu firms strategically shift financially reported income amongaffiliates in order to...