Over the past few years, policymakers have argued that everything from Apple's Irish tax deal to patent boxes to the LuxLeaks tax rulings represent “harmful tax competition.” Despite the ubiquity of this term, however, there is no internationally accepted definition of so-called harmful tax...

There exist multiple rationales for the U.S. extraterritorial tax system. The rationales seek to explain why overseas Americans should be subject to worldwide taxation by the United States.This paper challenges those rationales: The allegiance rationale is outmoded and rejected by the U.S....

We introduce public signals and cognitive dissonance into the standard Allingham-Sandmo-Yitzhaki (ASY) model of tax evasion. It turns out that the pres- ence of cognitive dissonanceattenuates tax evasion as individuals dislike allowing their true bevhaviour to diverge from their public statement...

This paper evaluates the relative importance of labor productivity vs. income taxes and social security contributions for tax compliance in an economy with a large degree of informality. To this end, we build a bargaining model in which matched employer-employee pairs of heterogeneous productive...

Firms may evade taxes on profits and can also avoid fulfilling legal restrictions on production activities by bribing bureaucrats. It is shown that the existence of tax evasion does not affect corruption activities at the firm level, while the budgetary repercussions of tax evasion induce less...

This paper analyzes corporate tax evasion in a principal-agent model with multitasking. A firm-owner hires a specialist tax manager who chooses the quantity as well as the quality of tax evasion. Higher quality is a form of self-insurance and lowers the firm's expected fine for tax evasion. In...

Using a Cournot oligopoly model with an endogenous number of firms and evasion of indirect taxes, this paper shows that more intense competition may have the negative side-effect of eroding tax revenues by increasing tax evasion. This will be the case if market entry costs decrease. A similar...

This paper extends the standard theoretical model of tax enforcement by allowing for the cross- matching of transactions in addition to the auditing of taxpayers. For the Value Added Tax (VAT) the matching of purchase and sales invoices is an important enforcement technique. The paper examines...

During the period 1996-2000, the coverage of VAT in Pakistan rose by twenty times in terms of the number of firms in the tax net and by ten times in terms of the volume of transactions subject to it. This paper leverages this staggered introduction of VAT in the country to estimate its...

We develop a tax competition model that allows for the setting of both an origin-based and a destination-based commodity tax rate in the presence of avoidance and evasion. In the presence of evasion, jurisdictions will give cross-border shoppers tax preferential treatment, thus not fully...