In the economic literature various political institutions designed to control the government have been analyzed. However, an important institution has been neglected so far: independent auditing institutions with an extended mandate to analyze the budget draft and individual policy proposals. We...

Public debts capitalize into property prices. Therefore, property owners tend to favor tax over debt financing for government spending. In contrast, tenants do not suffer from debt capitalization. Thus, they tend to favor debt over tax financing. Our model of the resulting democratic fight...

In situations of excess demand, many firms use waiting lists to allocate products and services among their customers. The resulting allocation is likely to be inefficient, creating opportunities for Pareto improving trades among those who are waiting in line. Yet, in the queuing context, the...

Awards in the form of orders, medals, decorations and titles are ubiquitous in monarchies and republics, private organizations, not-for-profit and profit-oriented firms. Nevertheless, economists have disregarded this kind of non-material extrinsic incentive. The demand for awards relies on an...

This paper analyzes the influence of the shadow economy on corruption and vice versa. We hypothesize that corruption and shadow economy are substitutes in high income countries while they are complements in low income countries. The hypotheses are tested for a cross-section of 120 countries and...

The intention of this paper is to analyze religiosity as a factor that potentially affects tax morale. For this purpose, a multivariate analysis has been done with data from the World Values Survey 1995- 1997, covering more than thirty countries at the individual level. Several variables, such...

Over the past few years, there has been a steadily increasing interest on the part of economists in happiness research. This paper argues that reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility and endeavors to provide an impression of this new, and...

In this paper we argue that a more legitimate and responsive state is an essential factor 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 helpful than telling them...

A crucial aspect of constitutional design is the provision of rules on how a constitution is to be amended. If procedures for constitutional amendment are very restrictive, changes will take place outside the constitution. These changes are likely to be against the citizens? interests and their...

Estimations of the size and development of the shadow economy for 145 countries, including developing, transition and highly developed OECD economies over the period 1999 to 2003 are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (as a percent of ?official? GDP) in 2002/03 in 96 developing...