In Italy, as in other countries around the world, recent reforms share the goal of increasing the fiscal autonomy of lower tiers of governments, from Regions to Municipalities, in order to align spending with funding responsibilities and increase the efficiency in the provision of essential...

In order to analyze the determinants of tax evasion, the existing literature on individual tax compliance typically takes a ‘prior-to-audit’ point of view. This paper focuses on a ‘post-audit, post-detection’—so far unexplored—framework, by investigating what happens after tax...

Anti–money laundering regulations have been centred on the “Know-Your-Customer” rule so far, overlooking the fact that criminal proceedings that need to be laundered are usually represented by cash. This is the first study which tries to provide an answer to the question of how much of...

This study designs a laboratory experiment to investigate the link between personal responsibility and individual preferences for redistribution. We contribute to the literature by considering two key insights: first, effort is costly; second, its fruits can be grasped only in the future....

We contribute to the debate on how to assess the size of the shadow economy by proposing a reinterpretation of the traditional Currency Demand Approach (CDA) a là Tanzi. In particular, we introduce three main innovations. First, we take a direct measure of cash transactions (the flow of cash...

The upward trend in the incidence of caesarean deliveries is a widespread stylised fact in many countries. Several studies have argued that it does not reflect, at least in part, patients’ needs but that it is also influenced by other factors, such as providers/physicians incentives. Not...

The objective of the paper is to study the disciplining role of both market forces and regional governments own resources in the provision of educational services. The historical evolution of school regulation in Italy and Spain (in particular regarding the funding of private schools run by...

The quality of the institutional environment is a crucial issue in understanding the effective outcome of fiscal decentralization initiatives. However, there has been so far very little work on the subject. In this paper we contribute to fill this gap by considering the municipalities belonging...

In this paper we study how prior tax notice (following audit and detection of tax fraud by Tax Authorities) affects individual behaviour in terms of tax compliance. We start with a very stylised theoretical framework, considering a situation in which an individual has been already audited and...

In this paper we investigate the economic rationality of the bed downsizing process, characterising the hospital industry worldwide in the last decades, as a measure to control public health care expenditure. Considering a sample of Italian hospitals, we provide fresh evidence on the factor...