Unobserved economy indicates all the productive activities that are beyond the sources of the data normally used to implement National Accounts, thus compromising the comprehensiveness of GDP. This paper aims to survey the five areas that compose the unobserved economy: underground economy,...

Abstract This study empirically investigates the extent of noncompliance with the tax code and examines the determinants of federal income tax evasion in the U.S. Employing a refined version of Feige’s (1986; 1989) General Currency Ratio (GCR) model to estimate a time series of unreported income...

New Estimates of U.S. Currency Abroad, the Domestic Money Supply and the Unreported Economy Edgar L. Feige * Abstract Despite financial innovations that have created important new substitutes for cash usage, per capita holdings of U.S. currency amount to $2950. Yet American households and...

Abstract This study empirically investigates the extent of non compliance with the tax code and the determinants of federal income tax evasion in the U.S. Employing the most recent data we find that 18-19% of total reportable income is not properly reported to the IRS, giving rise to a “tax...

This paper explains the term “VAT gap”, and briefly describes the calculation methods used in existing literature quantifying the VAT gap in various countries of the world. The VAT gap is calculated as the difference between the theoretical VAT liability ascertained from the national...

This paper analyses fiscal autonomy in Germany. First, it provides an overview of fiscal autonomy. What is novel in this paper compared to previous studies is the development of a fiscal autonomy coefficient for the states, based on communal data. The basic intention in the empirical part is to...

This paper analyses fiscal autonomy in Germany. First, it provides an overview of fiscal autonomy. What is novel in this paper compared to previous studies is the development of a fiscal autonomy coefficient for the states, based on communal data. The basic intention in the empirical part is to...

Recent literature on tax evasion emphasizes the importance of moral considerations to explain compliance behavior. As a consequence scholars aim to identify factors that shape this so-called tax morale. However, the causal link between tax morale and actual compliance behavior is not established...

This paper provides an evidence-based evaluation of the competing ways of explaining and tackling the informal economy. Conventionally, participants have been viewed as rational economic actors who engage in the informal economy when the benefits outweigh the costs, and thus participation is...

Does tax evasion run in the family? To answer this question, we study the case of the commuter tax allowance in Austria. This allowance is designed as a step function of the distance between the residence and the workplace, creating sharp discontinuities at each bracket threshold. The distance...