Our study explores the decision to participate in the shadow economy and evade taxes. It does so in light of expected unity maximization and behavioral economics. We report a laboratory experiment where a hypothetical credit market involved participants on both the supply and demand sides of the...

Arguably, for many citizens the perceived expected disutility from sanctions is smaller than the monetary gain from tax evasion. Nevertheless most people pay their taxes most of the time. In a lab experiment, we show that the willingness to pay taxes even absent enforcement is indeed pronounced....

We investigate the effects of an institutional mechanism that incentivizes taxpayers to blow the whistle on collusive corruption and tax compliance. We explore this through a formal leniency program. In our experiment, we nest collusive corruption within a tax evasion framework. We not only...