Is tax compliance driven only by extrinsic motivations such as deterrence and tax policy or is there also a role for intrinsic motivations such as morals, norms and psychology? Agents may comply based on moral sentiments, social norms, guilt and shame (Andreoni et al. 1998), all of which are...

Recent years have seen an unprecedented increase in the provision of R&D tax incentives. A growing empirical literature suggests that R&D tax incentives are instrumental in raising domestic R&D activity. In policy debates this finding is often interpreted to lend support to the notion that R&D...

We study deception choices and deception detection in a tax compliance experiment. We find large systematic differences in individual deception abilities. Tax payers are conscious about their own deception abilities. The empirical outcomes are in line with a theory suggesting that tax payers...

Over millennia, mankind has used hard cash in various forms ranging from shells to gold coins and paper. More recently, cash has become unpopular in political circles, as it effectively restricts states’ power to tax (explicitly or via negative interest rates) or to survey and potentially...

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...

This paper analyzes to what extent tax planning impacts on the level of the inheritance tax rate perceived as fair. In a factorial survey conducted in Germany it finds out that tax planning increases the fair tax rate by roughly 4 percentage points. The fair tax rate is not only determined by...

This paper derives the optimal financial contract when a borrowing entrepreneur can evade taxes in a model of costly state verification. In contrast to previous literature on costly state verification and financial contracting, we find that standard debt contracts are not optimal when tax...

We conduct a field experiment in a naturally occurring labor environment and track whether the performance of workers responds to unexpected wage increases. Specifically, we investigate how the timing of wage increases affects efforts. We find that workers performance is about 11% higher for the...

We examine the benefits of objective performance measurement in a field experiment conducted in a retail bank. At the outset objective performance measures of pro fits in each branch were only available on the branch level and managers allocated bonuses to their employees based on subjective...