We estimate the size and trend of the Egyptian shadow economy using two of the most common methods: the currency demand approach and the structural equation MIMIC model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study to estimate the size of the shadow economy in Egypt during...

Both buyers and sellers of goods and services may bene.t from letting their economic transactions go unrecorded for tax purposes. The supplier reduces his tax burden by underreporting income, whereas the consumer gains from buying a non-taxed lower-priced product. The distributional implications...

This paper studies the first large scale effort by the Brazilian government to increase the social security compliance of self-employed workers using behavioral interventions. In 2014, the Brazilian Ministry of Social Security gradually delivered by postal mail a booklet reminding nearly 3...

Field evidence suggests that agents belonging to the same group tend to behave similarly, i.e., behavior exhibits social interaction effects. Testing for such effects raises severe identification problems. We conduct an experiment that avoids these problems. The main design feature is that each...

The planned movement to the origin principle with the cross-border pre-tax system on a full-scale would lead, ceteris paribus, to changes in VAT revenues in the individual EU countries. For instance, the member countries with trade surpluses and higher VAT rates would be significantly better...

This paper studies how imposing norms on contribution behavior affects individuals' intrinsic motivation. We consider the church levy, which the Catholic Church in Germany collects as a charitable donation, despite the fact that the levy is legally a tax. We design a randomized field experiment...

This paper considers whether labour market rigidities lead to more underground economic activities. This is suggested by aggregate cross-country data which show that underground economic activities are more strongly correlated with a commonly used index of employment protection than with...

This paper utilizes an otherwise standard micro-founded general-equilibrium setup, which is augmented with a revenue-extraction mechanism to assess the magnitude of VAT evasion. The model is calibrated to Bulgaria after the introduction of the currency board (1999-2014), as one of the very few...

This paper offers a critical review of the methods used to estimate the extent of capital flight and illicit financial flows from developing countries. The largest estimates in the literature are based on imperfect methods with a great margin for error. Emerging new studies have built on...

This paper aims to provide a thorough theoretical formalisation of the ‘slippery slope’ framework in order to highlight the effects and the macroeconomic implications of the dynamics between power and trust. In particular, the proposed model is able to differentiate between coercive and...