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 this paper, a tax game with audit costs as a public bad is designed to investigate the impact of public disclosure on tax evasion experimentally. Three different types of tax privacy are tested, ranging from complete privacy to full disclosure. We expect to observe two different effects:...

Tax minimization strategies may lead to significant tax savings, which could, in turn, increase firm value. However, such strategies are also associated with significant costs, such as expected penalties and planning, agency, and reputation costs. The overall impact of firms' tax minimization...

In this paper we apply conjoint analysis to study the influence of changes in the tax rate and the tax base on the perceived tax burden. Our results show that the majority of individuals do not make rational tax decisions based on the actual tax burden, but rather use simple decision heuristics....

Using a series of laboratory experiments, this paper studies the effect of tax misperceptions on retirement savings and examines whether informational tax nudges and changing the form of the tax subsidy promote tax-efficient savings behavior. We find that deferred pension taxation results in...

Employment tax credit programs have been repeatedly used during economic crises, although their usefulness is empirically contestable. The objective of this paper is to quantify the tax effects of employment tax credit programs. A recent revision of the German inheritance tax law provides an...

In this paper we analyze the effect of investor level taxes, firm-specific ownership structure and firm-specific payout policy on firms' capital structure choice. Our analysis is based on data for 10,983 firms from 13 Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries over the time period 2002-2012....

As documented by empirical research, tax compliance costs are a considerable burden for private businesses. However, cost estimates may be biased due to survey non-response and questionnaire framing effects. This paper investigates the impact of both aspects on cost estimates. We do not find...

The European Union (EU) has no explicit common income tax law. Nevertheless, Court of Justice decisions have driven EU member states to adopt more similar corporate tax systems, and thus, to align the tax treatment of corporate profit distributions - dividends and capital gains. This paper...

This paper analyses the relationship between corporate governance and tax avoidance. We use a regression discontinuity design (RDD) in a two-stage instrumental variable and take advantage of the exogenous variation in the index membership around the DAX and MDAX threshold. We suppose the...