Tax Auditing as a Public Good Game: An Experimental Study on Punishment and Compliance

Prior experimental studies on tax evasion generally assume that the budget and the probability of audit are exogenously given, and ignore taxpayers' incentives to detect evasion and their compliance behaviour under such incentives. The experimental evidence of the present paper shows that, on average, subjects are willing to spend 20 to 30% of their tax revenue on auditing. Compliance is also greatly improved if subjects can determine the budget and, hence, the probability of audit. These findings suggest that taking taxpayers' incentives to detect evasion into consideration is important for the design of compliance‐improvement audit schemes.     

Feasible Net Income Distributions under Income Tax Evasion: An Equilibrium Analysis

We investigate how redistribution of income is affected by the fact that income is privately observed and agents may not be truthful in their reports to tax authorities. In response, the government establishes an audit mechanism with penalties. Adhering to a signaling equilibrium concept, we prove that agents resort to mixed strategies, which makes it difficult for tax authorities to identify the true types. The audit strategy has a cutoff property: All income declarations below the pivotal income are audited with a constant probability; other declarations are not audited. In spite of not necessarily being truthful, agents whose true income is below or equal to the pivotal income pay their liability and, consequently, the government is implementing the designated tax schedule for those agents. In equilibrium, penalties and tax corrections equal the audit cost. Consequently, the audit system does not contribute directly to revenues, and its role is restricted to supporting the equilibrium.     

Horizontal Mergers,Entry and International Trade

We use a two‐country trade model to analyze an authority's decision to approve or reject a merger followed by entry, when the entrant can choose where to locate. We show that approval of a merger in the small country followed by timely, likely and sufficient entry may lead to lower consumer welfare than its rejection: when the alternative to such entry is entry into another country that also benefits consumers through trade, then the gains of attracting entry are small. In this context, we discuss differences between optimal decisions by the small country's authority, large country's authority and supranational authority.     

Getting the word out: Enforcement information dissemination and compliance behavior

The question for the tax authority is how individuals become aware of enforcement effort. To be an effective tool in reducing tax evasion taxpayers must be aware of the current audit and penalty regime. We use laboratory experiments to examine the compliance impact of types of information dissemination regarding audit frequency and results. The information includes “official” information disseminated by the tax authority, and “unofficial”, or informal, communications among taxpayers. Our results indicate that the effect of the type of post-audit information is conditional on whether the taxpayer is well informed of the audit rate prior to filing. We find that the tax authority would be served by pre-announcing audit rates credibly and by emphasizing the previous period audit frequency in annual reporting of enforcement effort.     

Voting over selfishly optimal tax schedules: Can Pigouvian tax redistribute income?

This paper studies pairwise majority voting over selfishly optimal nonlinear income tax schedules proposed by a continuum of individuals who differ in privately observable skills and make consumption comparisons, which creates a negative positional externality. It shows that the tax schedule preferred by the median skill type will win the voting contest. Given a reference consumption defined as the average consumption in the population, all skills face the same Pigouvian tax rate in the utilitarian optimum, whereas in selfish optima high skills face a Pigouvian tax rate larger than that facing low skills, generating a novel income redistributive effect. Under a constant elasticity of labor supply, two more results are obtained. First, for Pareto, Champernowne, Weibull, and lognormal skill distributions, the selfishly optimal tax schedule facing high (low) skills tends to be more progressive when the bottom‐skill's (top‐skill's) status concern intensifies. Second, it identifies the conditions under which, in the voting equilibrium, high skills face higher marginal tax rates while low skills face lower ones than what they face in the utilitarian optimum.     

Maximum‐revenue versus Optimum‐welfare Export Taxes: a Delegation Game*

In the Eaton and Grossman (1986 ) Bertrand duopoly model of strategic export taxes, both countries may be better off if they both delegate to policymakers who maximize tax revenue rather than welfare. However, both countries delegating to policymakers who maximize tax revenue is not a Nash equilibrium unless the degree of product substitutability is sufficiently high. For a wide range of values for the degree of product substitutability, the game is a prisoner's dilemma where both countries are better off delegating to policymakers who maximize tax revenue but both will delegate to policymakers who maximize welfare in the Nash equilibrium.     

Equilibrium audit strategies against tax treaty shopping

This paper examines game‐theoretic models of tax treaty shopping. An investor can choose a direct or indirect investment route across countries to minimize tax. A tax agency can audit the investor. The audit is costly but it can give additional revenue to the tax agency. In simultaneous‐move games, regardless of whether incomplete information exists and whether a home country allows foreign tax credits, there are mixed‐strategy equilibria where the investor may choose tax‐minimizing indirect routes and the tax agency may audit the investor. This equilibrium random audit strategy helps the tax agency raise revenue and reduce treaty shopping. Comparative statics yields an implication consistent with empirical evidence. However, if the home country has a foreign tax credit system with a high tax rate, or if the tax agency observes the investor's action in a sequential‐move game, the investor always chooses the direct route, and no treaty shopping occurs in equilibrium.     

A general framework for measuring VAT compliance rates

Summary measures of Value Added Tax (VAT) compliance rates are valuable for identifying problem areas in VAT implementation. They are also essential for meaningful crosscountry and crosstime comparisons of VAT compliance. We present a comprehensive and general framework for calculating VAT compliance rates at both the economy wide and detailed sectoral levels. Unlike existing measures of VAT compliance, our framework isolates a compliance measure from the effects on VAT receipts of detailed features of VAT systems as actually implemented by tax authorities. These features include multiple VAT rates, exemptions, registration rates, refund limitations, informal activity, taxation of domestic nonresidents and undeclared imports. We implement our comprehensive VAT compliance measure for Vietnam, a country with a complex VAT system. Our estimate of Vietnam's VAT compliance rate is about 13 percentage points higher than that calculated by the most popular measure of compliance, Collection Efficiency (CE). Our method facilitates decomposition of the difference between CE and our VAT compliance measure into individual contributions by the statutory and structural features of Vietnam's VAT regime.     

Tax evasion and tax morale: A social network analysis

We study the effects of tax morale and social norms on tax evasion when individuals interact in a network. We present a model that incorporates incentives for tax compliance in the form of punishment and fines, tax morale, and reputation for social behaviour. We assume that individuals adjust their tax morale by observing the neighbours' tax morale. We simulate the model for different values of the parameters and show that the steady-state share of taxpayers as opposed to tax-evaders is affected by the probability of finding like-minded peers in the reference group (network integration), the weight that individuals attribute to reputation, and the share of individuals who update their tax morale. Last, we consider the possibility of a fiscal authority using the knowledge of the network structure and targeting ‘central’ individuals. We show that by positively affecting the tax morale of individuals whose influence within the network is high, a fiscal authority can increase tax compliance.     

Optimal Taxation of Risky Human Capital*

In a two‐period life‐cycle model with ex ante homogeneous households, earnings risk, and a general earnings function, we derive the optimal linear labor tax rate and optimal linear education subsidies. The optimal income tax trades off social insurance against incentives to work. Education subsidies are not used for social insurance, but they are only targeted at offsetting the distortions of the labor tax and internalizing a fiscal externality. Both optimal education subsidies and tax rates increase if labor and education are more complementary, because education subsidies indirectly lower labor tax distortions by stimulating labor supply. Optimal education subsidies (taxes) also correct non‐tax distortions arising from missing insurance markets. Education subsidies internalize a positive (negative) fiscal externality if there is underinvestment (overinvestment) in education because of risk. Education policy unambiguously allows for more social insurance if education is a risky activity. However, if education hedges against labor‐market risk, optimal tax rates could be lower than in the case without education subsidies.     

Tax compliance and obedience to authority at home and in the lab: A new experimental approach

In most experimental studies of tax evasion, participants are instructed that they may report any amount of income from zero up to the amount they actually earned or received. This amounts to an invitation to gamble. In contrast, real-world tax authorities unambiguously demand compliance. We develop two new settings for conducting tax experiments. Both involve an explicit demand for compliance. Thus, we can determine whether knowing that the experimental authority would regard evasion as wrongful disobedience will influence compliance decisions. We demonstrate that simply telling people that they are required to pay a “participation fee” analogous to a tax produces remarkably high compliance rates and less sensitivity to changes in economic variables than in the earlier experimental literature using invitation-to-gamble language. This suggests that many people pay taxes despite the financial attraction of non-compliance because they are strongly inclined towards obeying authority. Furthermore, we show that giving participants a week to make their reporting decisions at home without an authority figure physically present overcomes the inclination to obey for some people, significantly lowering compliance rates. However, the majority still complies, even after the audit rate falls from 25% to 1%, which would make non-compliance extremely attractive if it were viewed only as a simple matter of risk and expected return. Electronic Supplementary Material Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at . JEL Classification C91, H26     

Dubious versus trustworthy faces: what difference does it make for tax compliance?

We find experimental evidence that the decision problem of tax compliance changes if subjects’ declarations are not randomly assessed, but is based on their appearance as captured by pictures of their faces, even if the aggregate audit probability does not change. Some subjects may fear that their picture looks rather dubious, whereas others may believe that their picture looks more trustworthy than average. Depending on these beliefs, they may adjust their compliance decisions. Our experimental design allows us to disentangle these potentially countervailing effects.     

Revenge, Tax Informing, and the Optimal Bounty

A common belief is that the IRS pays tax informants 10% of whatever their tips produce in revenue. Actually, the bounty rate is even lower, averaging, in recent years, less than 2% of the amount of taxes and fines recovered. Why is it that the IRS is so tightfisted in rewarding informants who help recover taxes that otherwise would not have been recovered? The present paper approaches this question from an economic perspective, introducing a simple model of the informing decision, the implications of which are incorporated into the tax administration's problem of selecting a bounty rate, as well as a probability of convicting informed‐upon evaders, that maximize its expected net revenues from tax informing. The paper shows that a revenue‐maximizing tax administration would set its bounty rate lower and its prosecution efforts higher, the stronger, at the margin, informants' desire to get revenge on former parties with whom they have quarreled. While the IRS may be guided by ethical and moral considerations in designing its bounty scheme, it nevertheless behaves as if it were cynically exploiting informants' emotional drives, cutting down on their fair share in the recovered amounts to help finance its efforts in prosecuting informed‐upon evaders.     

Obedience to the symbol of authority: Experimental evidence on the symbolic source of legitimate authority

The performance of government activities, including law enforcement and regulation, depends on whether citizens perceive them as legitimate. Although substantial studies have explored the institutional sources of legitimacy, how non-institutional factors affect perceived legitimacy remains unclear. Human societies have a long history of employing symbolic icons to enhance the legitimacy of a given authority. This study reports a laboratory experiment of public goods that investigates whether (and to what extent) symbolic factors enhance perceived legitimacy. In the contexts of various incentive schemes and transparency levels, an “authority” in each group decides whether to target a “citizen” for punishment after observing the contributions of “citizens,” and untargeted citizens then choose to support or hinder the authority. A symbolic scepter is issued to the authority in the treated group, whereas this symbol is absent in the control group. The experimental results suggest that the political symbol significantly enhances the authority's legitimacy regardless of the payment scheme and information transparency. A further analysis shows that the political symbol is not associated with the authority's choices regarding enforcement. Rather, the symbol's effect on perceived legitimacy is primarily driven by the citizens' side—that is, the increasing intrinsic tendency to support authority.     

COMMUNITY PROPERTY AUCTION,NASH BIDDING RULE AND CHINA'S RURAL ECONOMIC REFORM

In this paper we present a model based on the auction theory for community properties and its possible application to China's economic reforms. We derive the Nash bidding rule for the first price sealed‐bid auction of a community‐owned object, and compare it with the bidding rule for auctions of a privately‐owned object. Moreover, we argue that in the process of China's economic reforms, auctioning off the community‐owned properties to private owners is the optimal way to achieve economic efficiency together with social equity. This paper has obvious implications for China's reforms relating to commercializing its rural land and other community property.     

Optimal sequential contract with a risk‐averse supplier

We study optimal contracts in environments where a risk‐averse supplier discovers cost information privately and gradually over time: the supplier is privately informed about its cost uncertainty at the time of contracting and discovers the realization of cost condition privately after contracting and before production. We show that both the buyer and the supplier prefer more cost uncertainty when the supplier is not very risk‐averse but less cost uncertainty when the supplier is sufficiently risk‐averse. However, the buyer always prefers to contract before the cost uncertainty resolves regardless of the supplier's degree of risk aversion. The nature of the optimal contract also depends on the supplier's risk preference. A separating contract is optimal when the supplier is not very risk‐averse; however, a pooling contract, which offers the same contract terms regardless of the cost uncertainty, can be optimal when the supplier becomes sufficiently risk‐averse. Moreover, the optimal production schedule is often characterized by “inflexible rules.”     

Resource harvesting regulation and enforcement: An evolutionary approach

We study the evolution of compliance and regulation of a renewable common pool resource, a fishery in particular, with appropriators whose decision on whether to comply or not with harvesting quotas is the result of imitation described by a proportional rule. The regulator first sets the optimal quota and then harvesters can choose between compliance and violation. We investigate myopic regulation and optimal regulation regimes with a proportional fine and an endogenized probability of audit. The outcome of regulation is characterized in terms of monomorphic and polymorphic steady states with respect to compliance. Using numerical simulations stability properties are examined, and sensitivity analysis explores the effect of various parameters on polymorphic steady-state outcomes.     

On the Optimal Taxation in a Growth Model of the Mixed Economy

Previous studies of second‐best taxation have shown that capital income shall not be taxed in the long run for some cases where individuals have infinite lives and a utility function of special form. The present paper improves upon this conclusion in two respects: first, the utility function may be of more general form, and second, zero capital income tax is required for the entire period, which does not depend on whether the individual's horizon is infinite or finite. Furthermore, we also show that the optimal tax rate on capital income should tend to zero in the long run if the first‐best optimum is attainable.     

QUANTIFYING THE LAFFER CURVE ON THE CONTINUED ACTIVITY TAX IN A DYNASTIC FRAMEWORK*

It is argued that the tax on continued activity should be removed by implementing actuarially fair schemes. However, these schemes cannot fund the expected Social Security (SS) deficit. This article proposes to give individuals a fraction of the actuarially fair incentives in the case of postponed retirement. SS faces a trade‐off between giving enough incentives to make individuals delay retirement and giving little increase in pensions in order to help finance its expected deficit. This trade‐off is captured by a Laffer curve. Finally, when the SS system aims to maximize welfare, the optimal tax on postponed retirement is still strictly positive.