Individuals in most all countries face a wide range of direct taxes on their income, especially variants of the individual income tax and payroll taxes. For the income tax, attempts are often made to reduce the compliance and administrative costs of the tax by using presumptive, or simplified,...

It is commonly argued that high tax rates motivate individuals to start a business as it is easier to avoid and evade taxes if self-employed compared to employed. If this is the case we would expect small business owners to be more responsive to tax rate changes than employees. This study...

We apply a direct method to estimate tax evasion in Italy, assuming that tax evaders might consider declaring a closer-to-true income in an anonymous interview. The methodology is applied to employed and self-employed taxpayers, combining the Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) by the...

Two issues are addressed in this paper. First, we attempt to ascertain whether the current fiscal policy in Spain satisfies the intertemporal borrowing constraint. For this purpose, we apply the traditional empirical tests of sustainability proposed in the literature, that pay special attention...

This paper proposes a method for evaluating the impact of tax reform on tax revenues and the distribution of the tax burden. The technique consists of decomposing actual revenue relative to potential revenue into components attributable to (i) changes in the tax rate structure (ii) deductions...

Using cumulative prospect theory as a notable example of reference-dependent preference, we revisit the basic portfolio model of tax evasion. We show that some controversial implications of the standard expected-utility theory, including that of a negative relationship between tax rates and...

This study on market and non-market labor supply and taxes is based on a theoretical microeconomic model with multiple labor supply in the formal and informal economy. This multiple time allocation model, which explicitly takes into account taxes, transfer payments, socioeconomic characteristics...

This paper uses tax return data to analyze bunching at the kink points of the US income tax schedule. We estimate the compensated elasticity of reported income with respect to (one minus) the marginal tax rate using bunching evidence. We find clear evidence of bunching around the first kink...

The objective of this paper is to empirically study if and to what extent people legally reduce their tax payments. There are few empirical studies of tax avoidance although avoidance may seriously affect the possibilities to raise tax revenue. I use a sample of Swedish siblings receiving...

Using micro-level data, we examine the effects of Russia's 2001 flat rate income tax reform on consumption, income, and tax evasion. We use the gap between household expenditures and reported earnings as a proxy for tax evasion with data from a household panel for 1998-2004. Utilizing...