Although tax non-filing and the resulting tax evasion are a challenge to public welfare, particularly in developing countries, scholarly knowledge on taxable citizens who do not register as taxpayers, also known as the ‘ghosts’, is minimal. To expand this knowledge base, this empirical paper...

The ability of a tax authority to successfully collect taxes depends critically on both its relationship with the taxpayers and how strongly these taxpayers are committed to contributing to the common good. We present evidence on a new non-intrusive approach aimed at fostering the commitment to...

Increasing the tax compliance of self-employed business owners (particularly of trade-specific service providers) remains an ongoing challenge for tax authorities. From a compliance point of view, cash transactions are particularly problematic when services are paid for on the spot, as such...

Tax compliance experiments have been conducted with students and have focused on the effects of deterrence on tax compliance. However, important insights can be gained looking at alternative instruments. A main purpose of this paper is to conduct an experiment in Costa Rica not with students...

Why so many people pay their taxes, although fines and audit probability are low, has become a central question in the tax compliance literature. A homo economicus, with a more refined motivation structure, helps us to shed light on this puzzle. This paper provides empirical evidence for the...

This paper analyses the impact of direct democracy, trust in government, the court and the legal system, and federalism on tax morale. In the tax compliance literature it is novel to analyse tax morale as dependent variable and to systematically analyse the effects of formal and informal...

Citizen tax compliance significantly dictates governmental fiscal capacities. Recognizing this, understanding the determinants of tax compliance remains paramount. While existing literature frequently isolates and tests individual determinants such as audit likelihood, penalty structures, tax...

We examine the nature of stated subjective probabilities in a complex, evolving context in which true event probabilities are not within subjects' explicit information set. Specifically, we collect information on subjective expectations in a car race wherein participants must bet on a particular...

Governments have taken remarkable measures during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in their efforts to safeguard citizens' health and the economy. As a consequence, public debts have reached unprecedented levels, which will require at some point higher taxes. Ensuring that citizens pay these taxes...

We study the joint design of nonlinear income and education taxes when the government pursues redistributive objectives. A key feature of our setup is that the ability type of an agent can affect both the costs and benefits of acquiring education. Market remuneration of agents depends on both...