In their book The Power to Tax, Brennan and Buchanan have pointed to a central weakness of the traditional theory of public finance and especially of the theory of optimal taxation: This approach overlooked the problem of governmental power and the tendency of this power to be abused. It was...

This paper analyses how tax morale and countries´ institutional quality affect the shadoweconomy, controlling in a multivariate analysis for a variety of potential factors. The literaturestrongly emphasizes the quantitative importance of these factors to understand the level andchanges of...

This paper provides a comparison of tax morale between inhabitants of East and WestGermany in its post-reunification period, using three World Values Survey/European ValuesSurvey waves between 1990 and 1999. German reunification is particularly interesting for theanalysis of tax morale as it is...

This paper analyses how governance or institutional quality and tax morale affect the shadoweconomy, using an international country panel and also within country data...

As the link between tax compliance and tax morale is found to be robust,finding the determinants of tax morale can help to understand and fight taxevasion. In this paper we analyze the effect of progressive taxation on taxmorale in a cross-country approach - which has not been investigated...

This paper presents experimental evidence that contributions to a public good can bepath-dependent for a limited time span. We study a repeated linear public-good gamewith punishment opportunities. Our data shows that subjects who had experienced ahigher marginal return on public-good...

This paper studies public-debt runs under alternative assumptions on the distribution oftaxes among tax bases, the distribution of debt among classes of taxpayers, and thedistributive preferences of the government. Asymmetries in the distribution of taxes--arising, for example, from income-tax...

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

The main purpose of this paper is to estimate the size and the growth of Quebec’sunderground economy, and the corresponding loss of taxes for the government. Ourapproach is based on a method developed by Pissarides and Weber (1989) and extended byLyssiotou et al. (2004). The basic hypothesis...

As the link between tax compliance and tax morale is found to be robust, finding thedeterminants of tax morale can help to understand and fight tax evasion. In this paper weanalyze the effect of progressive taxation on tax morale in a cross-country approach – whichhas not been investigated...