The paper aims to provide a detailed description and evaluation of the Italian experience in tax auditing and enforcement for SMEs which we believe may have some lessons for developing countries with similar sized shadow economies and large numbers of micro-enterprises. We focus on an audit...

We summarize the main features and results of the literature on marginal commodity tax reforms as initiated by Ahmad and Stern (1984) and developed further by Yitzhaki and Thirsk (1990). We establish new links with other fields of research, namely the literature on the use of equivalence scales...

A Tobin tax (TT) is studied by means of a portfolio model defined over the means and variances of two rates of return (domestic and foreign). When the correlation is negative, the TT is likely to decrease the speculative component of the share of portfolio invested abroad and to increase the...

As noted 30 years ago by Martin Feldstein, optimal taxes may be useless for practical purposes and emphasis should instead be placed on the possibility of enhancing welfare by reforming existing tax rates. In this perspective, marginal commodity tax reforms are gaining increasing attention due...

Studi di settore (Sds) can be seen as a procedure that is midway between mechanisms of audit selection and methods of normal taxation. Its impact depends both on the efficiency of the audit selection criteria as well as on the strength of the political compromise that is built-in. This paper has...

Italy adopted in 1998 a peculiar audit scheme (Studi di Settore), for small and medium enterprises and the self-employed. This scheme is based on a particular interaction between the tax agency and taxpayers, where the agency unveils only part of the information used to develop its audit rule....

Traditionally, the literature has seen stratification as linked closely to within-group inequality. More recently, some papers have focused on measuring the impact of stratification on betweengroup inequality. In this paper, we show that when two groups are involved, such an impact can be...

Income tax evasion by small rms has been seldom investigated mostly because of lack of data. In this paper we use a large data set produced by the Italian Revenue Agency for this project to analyse a recent policy to contrast business income tax evasion. Since 1998 Italy has adopted a method to...

This Note belongs to the recent literature emphasizing that the residual in the traditional Gini index decomposition reveals more than what is commonly believed. We show that the residual reveals the so far unexplored contribution of stratification to between-group inequality, and this suggests...