Taxes and Trust is the first book on taxes to focus on trust and the first work of social science to concentrate on how tax policy actually gets implemented on the ground in Poland, Russia and Ukraine. It highlights the nuances of the transitional Ukraine case and explains precisely how and why...

Income tax systems are multi-dimensional, and ignoring their non-rate aspects can introduce bias into cross-country empirical estimation of the impact of taxation. We analyze 10 non-rate tax system aspects, codified based on recent OECD reports. We find that a single factor (which we call...

Although the Romanian institutional landscape and its policies have dramatically improved since the 1990s, the low institutional capacity of its tax system remains mysteriously constant, despite continued efforts at improvement in this area and the fact that experimental data show that Romanians...

The main theme of this paper is that a more legitimate and responsive state appears to be an essential precondition for a more adequate level of tax effort in developing countries. While at first glance giving such advice to poor countries seeking to increase their tax ratios may not seem more...

The tax-systems perspective considers a variety of costs and behavioral margins often ignored in standard tax analysis: administrative and compliance costs, evasion and avoidance behavior, and multiple non-rate tax-system instruments (e.g., withholding and public disclosure). We show how the...

This paper examines the impact of ideology on tax revenues in Latin America, using a panel of 17 countries from 1990 to 2010. As a first approach, a fixed- effects model is used to identify the impact of ideology on taxation; left-leaning governments are associated with increases in total tax...

This paper studies the role of technology in local-government tax collection capacity in the developing world. We first conduct a new census of all local governments in Ghana to document a strong association between technology use and property tax billing, collection and enforcement. We then...

We show how to use field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and their associated high-level synthesis (HLS) compilers to solve heterogeneous agent models with incomplete markets and aggregate uncertainty (Krusell and Smith, 1998). We document that the acceleration delivered by one single FPGA is...