Narrowing the Tax Gap Through Presumptive Taxation

Narrowing the gap.

Since 1981 AIDS has illuminated, like a roving searchlight, a series of ethical questions, which extend far beyond the apparently narrow limits of one disease. It has revealed, one by one, human attitudes and behaviours that were previously unquestioned, or unobserved based on unidentified but shaky pre-suppositions. This commentary oVers two contrasting perspectives on the problems facing deve...

Narrowing the Nutrition Gap:

Tax Morale and Optimal Taxation

We study experimentally how taxpayers choose between two tax regimes to fund a public good. The first-best tax regime imposes a general, distortion-free income tax. However, this tax cannot be enforced. The second-best alternative supplements the income tax by a specific commodity tax. This tax cannot be evaded but distorts optimal consumption choices, instead. The result is that a large majori...

Underground Economy And Tax Gap

Narrowing the Explanatory Gap with Bridge Metaphors

A central problem in philosophy of mind concerns the relationship between subjective experiences and the physical processes that subserve them. There seems to be an unbridgeable “explanatory gap” between the two. Whereas other scientific explanations (e.g. the explanation of temperature in terms of kinetic energy) involve determinate relationships between two kinds of phenomena, correlations be...