In online commerce, a buyer cannot directly examine the product and has to trust the seller for the product description and delivery. The reputation of the seller (and other information signals on the quality of the product) can therefore affect the buyer's willingness to pay. However, while the...

Purpose – This paper examines citizens' attitudes toward paying taxes – what is sometimes termed their “tax morale” or the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes – focusing on the experience of individuals in the Russian Federation before, during, and after the transition from a planned...

The Pakistan system of taxing enterprises has undergone some major changes in recent years. Nevertheless, the corporate tax system remains plagued by a number of problems. The existence of numerous exemption programs has significantly reduced tax revenues, and has greatly distorted the...

The design of any system of transfers is a complex matter, and in practice very few countries are able to get it right, especially at the start of a process of decentralized system of finance. It is quite obvious that South Africa has made great strides in the design of its transfer system,...

Fiscal decentralization reform, the reform of fiscal relations between different levels of government, is an important fiscal policy issue in many African countries. While for many African nations the decentralized delivery of government goods and services is a relatively new concept, the issue...

Indonesia is engaged in an unprecedented major social and economic experiment in which much authority and responsibility for its governmental expenditures are being decentralized from the national government, largely to the local government level rather than the provincial government level. From...

The use of expenditure needs, sometimes referred to as "expenditure norms", "budgetary norms", or "minimum standards", is important in the formulation of budgets and, especially, in the establishment of transfer and grant formulae. Minimum standards are also used by central governments to...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the income tax penalty associated with marriage contributes to the decision of a couple to live together as a married vs. a cohabiting couple. In this paper, we use household data from the Panel Study on Income Dynamics to estimate the impact of various factors,...

There is a large empirical literature that demonstrates the importance of economic factors in the decision to marry. Taxes, however, have been largely overlooked as a determinant of marriage, even though the tax system in the United States is not marriage-neutral; that is, when two individuals...