Deterrence can boost compliance with tax authorities or undermine it depending on whether taxpayers cope with the threat of taxation through thinking morally, or feeling oppressed, or taking control of the tax they pay. When feeling oppressed dominates thinking morally in response to deterrence,...

In our tax evasion experiment each participant earns his income by solving intertemporal allocation tasks. The resulting income has to be declared in a tax return which is randomly verified. If tax evasion is detected, the subject is punished by a fixed penalty capturing the fact that (in...

This paper deals with a Niskanen type of public-procurement agency. We show that the procurement game should be separated into an investment game and a project game, the first game to be played before nature determines the actual realizations of benefit and costs of the project, the second game...

Fiscal federalism implies a challenge of holding fiscal discipline at the local level. Recent analyses of fiscal adjustment have addressed the design of fiscal and political institutions for the U.S. states, and have shown how tax limits and anti-deficit rules strengthen immediate shock...

Governments struggle with rising service spending, and user charges represent a possible incentive mechanism to control costs. This paper investigates the relationships between costs and user charges in the sewage industry in Norwegian local governments. The analysis addresses the following...

In a two-period model with uncertainty about life expectancy, we analyze several measures that are typically included in a social security reform: tax incentives for private life annuities, a cut in the social security benefits, and an increase in the social security tax. First, we look at the...

Under adverse selection, redlining of borrowers may occur when their wealth is not sufficient to reach the collateral needed by creditors to separate types. In this paper, potential entrepreneurs can join in a peer group and voluntarily decide to collect and redistribute their endowments. If the...

This paper extends the previous literature on optimal redistributive taxation in the presence of externalities to a multiexternality setting. While taxes on income and on 'clean' commodities are still unaffected by the externalities, which confirms previous results, I find that the existence of...

The paper analyzes the optimal income taxation policy when inequity aversion exists among taxpayers. The influence of inequity aversion on the optimal income tax scheme depends on whether taxpayers are concerned about inequality in wages or in rents (i.e., wages minus effort costs). If agents...

This paper considers the financing of investment in the presence of information asymmetry between "insiders" and "outsiders" of the firms. It establishes a well-defined capital structure for the economy as a whole with the following features: low-productivity firms rely on the equity market to...