Gender norms, i.e. the role of men and women in the society, are a fundamental channel through which culture may influence preferences for redistribution and public policies. We consider both cross-country and individual level evidence on this mechanism. We find that in countries that are...

We study corporate tax avoidance and associated real effects of private equity buyouts.Exploiting over 10,000 deals and private firm data in Europe, we document that target firms' effective tax rates decrease by 13% after the transaction. Those targets engaging in significant post-deal tax...

Promotion of both market fairness and efficiency has long been a goal of securities market regulators worldwide. While previous studies mostly focused on market efficiency, our paper proposes tools to improve market fairness. We define market fairness as the ability of a market structure and its...

Die zunehmende Digitalisierung hat zu einem starken Wachstum der Plattformökonomie beigetragen. Online-Vermittlungsplattformen ermöglichen Verbrauchern/innen eine professionelle Interaktion zum Austausch von Gütern und Dienstleistungen. Eines der bekanntesten Geschäftsmodelle dieses...

In this paper, we examine the gender specific impact of discriminatory taxation on fairness perception and individual labor supply decisions. Using the controlled environment of an experimental laboratory, we manipulate both distributional as well as procedural justice of taxation between...

El mundo enfrenta un panorama de alta incertidumbre durante el 2020 como resultado de la pandemia del coronavirus y sus efectos sobre la población y la economía global. La propagación del COVID-19, aparte de su impacto sobre la población y la salud pública, condujo en todo el mundo a...

The benefits theory of tax fairness was the dominant approach to tax justice until the late nineteenth century. This paper examines the reasons for the rejection of the benefits principle in the nineteenth century and the evolution of benefits theory in the twentieth century in response to this...

Several strands in the international development of taxation during the last decades have contributed to structural problems that act as a hinder and even counteract the basis for gender equality. A general problem is that tax equity has become equivalent to what is good for economic growth....

Unless treaties are read in very liberal terms, the European Union (EU) is not competent for defining the construct of a fair tax system and determining who should pay taxes and in which proportion within the European Union. Yet, the European Commission has increasingly been using references to...

Section' 461(h), dealing with the treatment of liabilities by accrual-method taxpayers, was enacted in 1984, in response to the failure of the Internal Revenue Code to recognize time-value-of-money concepts in the tax laws. Prior to the enactment of § 461(h), an accrual-method taxpayer could...

The “fair” taxation of digital business models is challenging. One of the key aspects — both policy makers and the public opinion consider as most pressuring — is the determination of intragroup transfer prices for intangibles used in digital business models. In this paper, we address...

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....

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the debate around the importance of fiscal justice in the promotion of equity and possible pathways to achieve it. To that end, the study included an analysis of the Brazilian tax system and of the existing literature on its distributive role and its...

Tax expenditures are preferential tax treatments granted to specific individuals or categories of households which aim at achieving social and economic goals. They are widely used by EU Member States. However, their fiscal and equity impacts are not always clear and their effectiveness and...

The persisting gender differences in employment rates and patterns and gender gaps in unpaid care work, employment rates, income, old age security, poverty and wealth are all closely linked to the allocative and distributional outcome of tax regulations.

Barbara Fried takes the view that uniform taxation — that is, a single rate applicable to all income levels — cannot be defended on any grounds of justice. She goes further by saying that, of all possible rate structures, it might be “the hardest one” to ground in “a” theory of...

An issue of interest in the literature that explores the drivers of inequality is the distributional bearing of tax and transfer policy, where an important theme concerns changes in the relative treatment of alternative population subgroups. We develop an empirical approach for quantifying the...

Equity and efficiency -- A society within a society -- Thomas Aquinas : the interplay of natural and positive law -- William of Ockham : repudiation of power and wealth -- Martin Luther's redistributive theology of the Lord's supper -- John Calvin and the challenge of inequality -- Triumph of...

This paper studies the optimal taxation of bequests in a model in which agents have heterogeneous preferences over their consumption and the net-of-tax bequest received by their heir. The bequest left by an individual depends on both her degree of altruism and the bequest received from her...

This paper exploits a recent devolution of tax setting powers in the German federation to study the effects of fiscal equalization on subnational governments' tax policy. Based on an analysis of the system of fiscal equalization transfers, we argue that the redistribution of revenues provides...

The ability-to-pay approach assesses taxes paid as a sacrifice by the taxpayers. This raises the question of how to define and how to measure it: in absolute, relative, or marginal terms? U.S. respondents prefer a tax schedule that is either a pure (absolute) Equal Sacrifice or a mixture of...

Sub-national governments often finance substantial parts of their budgets via taxes on capital or other mobile factors - despite having access to alternative, less distortionary, revenue sources. This paper develops three hypotheses to explain this pattern and tests them in a natural experiment...

This paper brings an important empirical contribution to the academic literature by examining whether gender differences in tax compliance are due to higher prosociality among women. We conducted a large cross-national tax compliance experiment carried out in Italy, U.K., U.S., Sweden, and...

The "fair" taxation of digital business models is challenging. One of the key aspects - both policy makers and the public opinion consider as most pressuring - is the determination of intragroup transfer prices for intangibles used in digital business models. In this paper, we address the issue...

A common assumption in the optimal taxation literature is that the social planner maximizes a welfarist social welfare function with weights decreasing with income. However, high transfer withdrawal rates in many countries imply very low weights for the working poor in practice. We extend the...