The present paper uses a survey of 1062 Czechs and 524 Slovaks to ask why people evade taxes. We maintain that the Czech and Slovak Republics are “twins” separated at birth and that divergences between these countries since their separation in 1992 can explain divergences in their rates of...

We use a dataset of 1062 individuals from the Czech Republic to forecast the evolution of tax evasion in that country. We ask each respondent how intensely (never, sometimes, often) he evaded taxes in 1995, 1999, and 2000, to calculate probabilities the average individual will move between these...

A 2002 survey of 1089 Czechs and 501 Slovaks, as well as a more limited survey of Hungary, and Poland, indicates that an individual may evade taxes in part if he believes he is receiving substandard government services. We suggest that an individual’s evaluation of the quality of government...

Using surveys of the Czech Republic taken in 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006 we measure how the percentage of tax evaders evolved from 1995 until 2006. We find that at first evasion rose, leveled off, and then fell along a quadratic path, suggesting the existence of what we call an evasional Kuznets...

An easy and popular method for measuring the size of the underground economy is to use macro-data such as money demand or electricity demand to infer what the legitimate economy needs, and then to attribute the remaining consumption to the underground economy. Such inferences rely on the...

The two most prominent deadweight losses in public finance are the triangle loss from taxation and the rectangle loss from rent-seeking. This paper suggests that a third type of deadweight loss can rival these two in size and deserves detailed exploration. In the presence of the underground...

The paper demonstrates how survey methods and retrospective questions can be put to effective use in the study of shadow-economy dynamics; specifically, the evolution of tax evasion in the Czech Republic. The authors measure the average individual's transition between the shadow and official...

In the presence of differing abilities to evade taxes, markets select producers for their evasive skills and their abilities to keep costs of production low. Inefficient firms crowd out efficient firms. If the least efficient firms are the best tax evaders, adverse selection is severe and output...

For the first time we develop a time series of tax evasion (in % of official GDP) for 38 OECD countries over the period 1999 to 2010 based on MIMIC model estimations of the shadow economy. Considering indirect taxation and self-employment as the driving forces of tax evasion, we observe a...

This survey presents the various methods to estimate the size of the shadow economy, their strengths and weaknesses and the estimation results. The purpose of the survey is threefold. Firstly, it demonstrates that no ideal method to estimate the size and development of the shadow economy exists....