This paper treats local governments as utility maximizing agents when they allocate resources among different service sectors. We present estimates for eight service sectors, based on a modified version of the extended linear expenditure system (ELES) and using observations at the municipal...

Fiscal disparities arise from differences in costs and capacity to produce a standard package of public services. This paper proposes to use a structural modelling approach as basis for measuring fiscal disparities across municipalities. This approach differs from the widely used reduced-form...

The seminal paper by Pissarides and Weber (1989) is one of several previous studies trying to measure the size of the black economy. Pissarides and Weber compared the relationship between food expenditure and income in two groups of workers, self-employed and employees in employment, assuming...

The elasticity of taxable income (ETI) is known to represent a summary measure of tax efficiency costs, which means that further information about the behavioral components of the ETI is not required for its use in tax policy design. However, as there are response margins that may cause biases...

We conduct the first-ever study of actual searches done in a public tax disclosure system, analyzing about one million searches done in 2014 and 2015 in Norway. We characterize the social network these searches comprise, including its degree of homophily and reciprocation, and the demographics...

The Norwegian Tax Administration operated multi-year random audits of personal income tax returns. We exploit this exceptional randomized setup to estimate the effects of tax audits on future compliance explicitly distinguishing between dynamic responses of compliant and noncompliant audited...

This study uses a simple theory model to examine how time preferences influence food choices made by individuals, which in turn have implications for their future health. The theory results demonstrate that individuals with higher bias for the present or lower patience will have poorer health...

This study measured the discount rates of a sample of 262 farm households in the Ethiopian highlands, using a time preference experiment with real payoffs. In general, the median discount rate was very high—more than double the interest rate on the outstanding debt—and varied systematically...

Charitable giving is one of the major obligations Islam and a strong Muslim norm endorses giving to the needy, but discourages public displays of giving. This norm is puzzling in light of previous evidence, suggesting that making donations public often increases giving. We use an experiment to...

We conducted a field experiment in a protected area to explore the effects of conformity to a social reference versus a comparable, but imposed, suggested donation. As observed before, we see visitors conforming to the changing social reference. On the other hand, the treatment in which we...