A tax buyout is a contract between tax authorities and a tax payer which reduces the marginal income tax rate in exchange for a lump-sum payment. While previous contributions have focussed on labour supply, we consider the interaction with tax evasion and show that a buyout can increase expected...

This paper examines whether risk-taking in a lottery depends on the opportunity to respond to the lottery outcome through additional labor effort and/or tax evasion. Previous empirical attempts to answer this question face identification issues due to self-selection into jobs that facilitate tax...

Motivated by the observation that access to evasion opportunities is distributed heterogeneously across the labor market, this paper examines the extent to which labor supply elasticities with respect to tax rates depend on such evasion opportunities. We first discuss the channels through which...

Using the example of the inheritance tax, this paper examines whether and how the strictness of tax compliance norms depends on the interrelation between tax objectives, tax design, and taxed behavior. Building on the literature on tax evasion, optimal inheritance taxation, family economics, and...

This paper studies the effect of tax evasion on the economic incidence of sales taxes. We design a laboratory experiment in which buyers and sellers trade a fictitious good in double auction markets. A per-unit tax is imposed on sellers, and sellers in the treatment group are provided the...

Greece has the largest underground economy in the eurozone and one of the largest in Europe and the OECD countries. On the other hand, Greece is notoriously known for its sizable and widespread tax evasion primarily because of the large number of self employed and its wide geographical...

This paper studies the effect of tax evasion on the economic incidence of sales taxes. We design a laboratory experiment in which buyers and sellers trade a fictitious good in double auction markets. A per-unit tax is imposed on sellers, and sellers in the treatment group are provided the...

We investigate effects of tax reporting institutions on evasion and incidence using an experimental double auction market setting. We find that 28% of the sellers are truthful when only sellers report, but that 88% and 64% of them are truthful under costless and costly third-party reporting by...

We study optimal income taxation in a framework where one's willingness to report his income truthfully is positively correlated with his type. We show that allowing low-productivity types to cheat leads to Pareto-superior outcomes as compared to deterring them, even if audits can be performed...

Important as it is for public policy, there is still no consensus about the size of the revenue-maximizing tax rate at the top of the Laffer curve. The purpose of this essay is not to supply a correct rate, but to identify difficulties in doing so. 1) Estimates of the revenue-maximizing tax rate...