Direct incentives and punishments are the most common instruments to fight tax evasion. The theoretical literature disregarded indirect schemes, such as itemised deductions, in which an agent has an interest in that other agents declare their revenue. Itemised deductions provide an incentive for...

Public finance is strongly affected by tax evasion, which implies that public sector resources are very limited. Most of the analysis on how to fight tax evasion focused on the ways to deter evasion through incentives to people not to evade. This model has a different approach: instead of...

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 study leverages a unique data set on the universe of transactions exiting the Ecuadorian economy to estimate the tax-price elasticity of demand for tax-sheltering activities using offshore fiscal havens. I determine this elasticity quasi-experimentally by comparing the evolution in funds...

We ask whether attitudes toward government play a causal role in the evasion of U.S. personal income taxes. We first use individual-level survey data to demonstrate a link between sharing the party of the president and trust in the administration generally and opinions on taxation and spending...

Tax evasion represents nowadays a complex economic and social phenomenon. It is also the central vector of the informal economy that proves the true amplitude of the informal plateau of the economy, being in interaction and in interdependence with the other components specific for economic and...

The desirability of inheritance and gift taxes depends on individuals’ tax responsiveness. This paper demonstrates how strongly, and in what way, the German inheritance and gift tax influences taxpayer behavior. To that end, it combines administrative data with cross-bracket tax variation: a...

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...

This paper proposes a method for evaluating the impact of tax reform on tax revenues and the distribution of the tax burden. The technique consists of decomposing actual revenue relative to potential revenue into components attributable to (i) changes in the tax rate structure (ii) deductions...

Governments increasingly use changes in tax rules to combat evasion. We develop a general approach to point-identify tax compliance along with supply and demand elasticities; identification requires data on prices and quantities before and after changes in tax enforcement and a demand or supply...