The enforcement of compliance with tax regulation is a complex task. This is particularly the case when the administrative capacity of the tax authority is low, as it often happens in developing and transition countries. This paper draws on some international experiences in fighting tax evasion...

This paper examines the interaction between minimum wage legislation and tax evasion by employed labor. I develop a model in which firms and workers may agree to report less than the true amount of earnings to the fiscal authorities. I show that introducing a minimum wage creates a spike in the...

Motivated by the observation that access to evasion opportunities is distributed heterogeneously across the labor market, this paper examines the extent to which labor supply elasticities with respect to tax rates depend on such evasion opportunities. We first discuss the channels through which...

The standard expected utility model of tax evasion predicts that evasion is decreasing in the marginal tax rate (the Yitzhaki puzzle). The existing literature disagrees on whether prospect theory overturns the puzzle. We disentangle four distinct elements of prospect theory and find loss...

Does tax evasion run in the family? To answer this question, we study the case of the commuter tax allowance in Austria. This allowance is designed as a step function of the distance between the residence and the workplace, creating sharp discontinuities at each bracket threshold. The distance...

In this paper we try to understand the phenomena whereby a large proportion of the population evades tax payments. We present a model which incorporates elements from the theory of information cascades with the standard model of tax evasion and analyze the connection between the decision of a...

Unreported labour by one worker in a firm increases the probability of detection for his fellow workers, not only for himself. The firm takes this external effect into account. As a consequence, unreported work becomes rationed by the firms demand, rather than determined by demand equal supply....

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model where employers may avoid making social security contributions by offering some workers "secondary contracts". When calibrated using aggregate tax revenue data, the model delivers estimates of secondary "off the books" employment that are...

The canonical model of Allingham and Sandmo (1972) predicts that firms evade taxes by optimally trading off between the costs and benefits of evasion. However, there is no direct evidence that firms react to audits in this way. We conducted a large-scale field experiment in collaboration with...

This article studies how social insurance programs shape individual's incentives to take up registered employment and to report earnings to the tax authorities. The analysis is based on a social insurance reform in Uruguay that extended healthcare coverage to the dependent children of registered...