This paper shows that stricter enforcement may increase tax evasion. Individuals vote on a linear income tax which is used to finance lump sum transfers. Stricter enforcement may make redistributive taxation more attractive to the decisive voter. The tax rate and transfer may rise which in turn may increase tax evasion. An example shows that this result can actually occur. The paper also discus...

underground economy affects important indexes such as formal gdp, unemployment, consumption, production and etc. therefore it is necessary to identify elements and factors which affect underground economy to restrict it. surveys and studies indicate the size of iran’s underground economy is high and taxes, quantity and quality of regulations and performance of formal economy are the important f...

Reducing tax evasion is a priority for many governments. A growing literature argues that verifying taxpayer reports against third-party information is critical for tax collection. However, effectiveness can be limited when tax authorities face constraints to credible enforcement and taxpayers make offsetting adjustments on other margins. We exploit a policy intervention in which Ecuadorian fir...

In markets where transactions are governed by contractual incompleteness, revealed intentions to evade taxes may affect market performance. We experimentally examine the impact of tax evasion attempts on the performance of credence goods markets, where contractual incompleteness results from asymmetric information on the welfare maximizing quality of the good. We find that tax evasion attempts ...

A benchmark result in the political economy of taxation is that majority voting over a linear income tax schedule will result in an inefficiently high tax rate whenever the median voter has a below average income. The present paper examines the role of tax avoidance for this welfare assessment. We find that the inefficiency in the voting equilibrium is the lower, the higher the average level of...

We develop a moral hazard model with auditing where both the principal and the agent can in‡uence the probability that the true state of nature is veri…ed. This setting is widely applicable for situations where fraudulent reporting with costly state veri…cation takes place. However, we use the framework to investigate tax evasion. We model tax evasion as a concealment-detection contest between ...

There is a widely held perception that fundamental tax reform would reduce the level of criminal and other “underground” economic activity. The popular argument relies on the idea that replacing the income tax with a sales tax would implicitly tax the return to criminal activity, whereas the return to crime is effectively untaxed by an income tax. This paper finds instead that the impact of tax...

Although tax withholding is a central component of the US income tax system, there is a paucity of research that explores the relationship between tax withholding and subsequent tax reporting. Using a framed field experiment with working adults and deliberate framing, this study looks directly at this nexus. Briefly, we find interesting asymmetries related to tax position, in particular that ta...

The Beckerian approach to tax compliance examines how a tax authority can maximize social welfare by trading-off audit probability against the fine rate on undeclared tax. This paper offers an alternative examination of the privately optimal behavior of a tax authority tasked by government to maximize expected revenue. The tax authority is able to trade-off audit probability against audit effec...

We consider corporate tax evasion as a decision a¤ecting business partners. There are costs of uncoordinated tax reports, both in terms of catching inspectors’attention and running accounts. If these costs are small, there exist a unique Nash equilibrium of the game between the tax authority and a population of heterogenous …rms. In this equilibrium, the miscoordination costs enhance non-compli...