Standard economic models of tax compliance have focused on enforcement-driven compliance. Notably, tax administrators also tend to place a great deal of emphasis on the importance of improving “tax morale” by encouraging voluntary compliance, creating a culture of compliance, and changing social norms. Tax morale does indeed appear to be an important component of compliance decisions, and there...

The background for this paper is our work with evolutionary economic models and their implementation in a new, effective system for programming and simulating such models. The major purpose of the project is to decrease the barriers to entry to computer simulation without decreasing the quality of the work. This purpose has suggested a study of the different styles of simulation work as well as...

Abstract. This paper adapts the model developed by Dixit (1996) to analyze the case of interest group competition over land reform politics in Brazil. The model presents some important advances over earlier seminal economic models of interest group competition in the literature, such as Peltzman (1976), Becker (1983) and Denzau and Munger (1986) in that it considers that government agencies res...

The paper discusses the possibility of constructing economic models using the methodology of model construction in classical mechanics. At the same time, unlike the “econophysical” approach, the properties of economic models are derived without involvement of any equivalent physical properties, but with account of the types of symmetry existing in the economic system. It has been shown that at ...

This paper distills and extends recent research on the economics of human development and social mobility. It summarizes the evidence from diverse literatures on the importance of early life conditions in shaping multiple life skills and the evidence on critical and sensitive investment periods for shaping different skills. It presents economic models that rationalize the evidence and unify the...

Classical economic models are predicated on the idea that the ultimate aim of choice is to maximize utility or reward. In contrast, an alternative perspective highlights the fact that adaptive behavior requires agents' to model their environment and minimize surprise about the states they frequent. We propose that choice behavior can be more accurately accounted for by surprise minimization com...

Even though economic models have been relatively successful in explaining the long run patterns of house prices, they have more difficulties in explaining short run developments of the housing markets. However, the fact that during such ‘bubbles’ the spatial pattern of house prices, which can mainly be attributed to accessibility differences, usually remains unchanged, suggests that the irratio...

In contrast with neoclassical economic models that assume that individuals hold preferences independently of others, there exist growing bodies of research demonstrating that preferences are often interdependent and based upon relative comparisons.This paper reviews research concerning salarydispersionwithinfirms through the frameworkof four hypotheses that are generatedby evolutionaryperspecti...

The degree of disease risk represented by the introduction, spread, or establishment of one or several diseases through the importation of animals and animal products is assessed by importing countries through an analysis of risk. The components of a risk analysis include hazard identification, risk assessment, risk management, and risk communication. A risk assessment starts with identificatio...

An important element of resource management and conservation is an understanding of the tradeoffs between marketed products such as timber and measures of environmental quality such as biodiversity. In this paper, we develop an integrated economic – ecological spatial optimization model. The integrated model incorporates dynamic forest sector harvesting, oil and gas sector development, coarse f...