Consumers evaluate product quality with information signals such as brand name giving an advantage to established firms over other firms even when introducing a new product. Another signal is 'country of origin' and, as high-income countries focus more heavily on higher quality goods, there is a...

While neoclassical economic theory sheds insight into the way that audit rates and penalty rates interact when individuals decide to declare income for taxation, it predicts far lower levels of compliance than observed levels of compliance. This paper analyses experimental responses to explore a...

This paper explores the welfare effects of international subsidies designed to expedite the production of global public goods. It distinguishes between the impact subsidies exert on behaviour and the impact subsidies exert on welfare. Subsidies that encourage recipients to contribute to the...

Allingham and Sandmo demonstrated that under decreasing absolute risk aversion, when the penalty for tax evasion fell on evaded income, an increase in the tax rate might increase, decrease, or leave unaltered the level of evaded income. Yitzhaki resolved the ambiguity by considering the impact...

Countercyclical government spending offers social protection to the vulnerable when economies move into recession. This paper questions the extent to which governments are able to spend countercyclically and the extent to which social expenditures are likely to be countercyclical. An analysis of...

This paper explores the way governments rely on budgets. Budgets are classified with reference to functions (e.g. defence, education, etc.), but expenditure from one budget (e.g. the overseas budget) can prove as effective as expenditure from another budget (e.g. the environment budget) when...

This paper sets out to consider individuals’ motivations to evade taxation. Experimental results indicate that individuals do not simply maximize pecuniary welfare. Their behaviour is consistent with the presence of a ‘spite effect’ when their perceptions are that enforcement variables are...

This paper tests the predictions that (i) sub-central government expenditures are procyclical and (ii) sub-central government expenditures are likely to be more procyclical than central government spending. The predictions are based on the importance of ‘voracity effects’ and on the...