1,721,063 research outputs found
Reporting import tariffs (and other taxes)
No full textThis paper derives the implications for compliance and fiscal revenues of a tax base that is the product of several factors. For instance, in the case of import tariffs, the tax base is the product of quantity and unit value, both reported to, and during an audit assessed by, the custom authority. Import tariffs are particularly interesting as custom receipts represent an important share of government revenues in many developing countries and there has recently been a surge in empirical studies showing how evasion in this field is a pervasive phenomenon. I show that, with a multiplicative tax base, when the fiscal authority has an imperfect detection technology a greater declaration in one dimension actually increases the fine when evasion in the other dimension is detected. Therefore, there is an additional incentive for the taxpayer to underdeclare and a multiplicative tax base is subject to more evasion, compared to a tax base that can be assessed directly. As a result, fiscal revenues decrease with the dimensionality of the tax base. Also, voluntary compliance and fiscal revenues may be higher when the importer is required to declare only the total value of imports instead of quantity and unit value separately.
This paper provides an argument in favour of uniform or specific tariffs and a reason for why a flat tax may improve compliance
Disentangling the sources of pro-socially motivated effort: A field experiment
No full textThis paper presents evidence from a field experiment, which aims to identify the two sources of workers' pro-social motivation that have been considered in the literature: warm glow altruism and pure altruism. We employ an experimental design that first measures the level of effort exerted by student workers on a data entry task in an environment that elicits purely selfish behavior and we compare it to effort exerted in an environment that also induces warm glow altruism. We then compare the latter to effort exerted in an environment where both types of altruistic preferences are elicited. We find evidence that women increase effort due to warm glow altruism while we do not find any additional impact due to pure altruism. On the other hand, men in our sample are not responsive to any of the treatments. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
An experimental investigation of intrinsic motivations for giving
No full textThis paper presents results from a modified dictator experiment aimed at distinguishing and quantifying intrinsic motivations for giving. We employ an experimental design with three treatments that vary the recipient (experimenter, charity) and amount passed (fixed, varying). We find giving to the experimenter not to be significantly different from giving to a charity, when the amount the subject donates crowds out the amount donated by the experimenter such that the charity always receives a fixed amount. This result suggests that the latter treatment, first used by Crumpler and Grossman (J Public Econ 92(5-6):1011-1021, 2008), does not provide a clean test of warm glow motivation. We then propose a new method of detecting warm glow motivation based on the idea that in a random-lottery incentive (RLI) scheme, such as the one we employ, warm glow accumulates and this may lead to satiation, whereas purely altruistic motivation does not. We also provide bounds on the magnitudes of warm glow and pure altruism as motives that drive giving in our experiment
Communities and testing for COVID-19
No full textThe response to the COVID-19 epidemic requires people to undertake actions such as mask-wearing or vaccination that also confer benefits to the whole community, and therefore, are akin to public good contributions. This is the case also for participation to the mass testing that took place between November 18th and 25th, 2020 in the South Tyrol region of Italy, where 361,781 out of 500,607 (72.3%) eligible residents volunteered to take a COVID-19 rapid antigen test. We examine the community characteristics that are associated with higher testing rates. Our findings point to a number of key community determinants of people’s willingness to volunteer. Convenience and social capital were important factors. Beyond that, socioeconomic status and religiosity were also both positively related to greater testing, while childhood vaccinations refusal rates show a negative relationship
Stay or flee? Hit-and-run accidents, darkness and probability of punishment
No full textEmpirical studies on the economic theory of crime have extensively analyzed the importance of the probability of punishment with regard to premeditated criminal activities. Unplanned crimes also occur, however, and this paper will focus on a very serious and widespread example: the hit-and-run road accident. Using police records for every road accident with injuries or mortalities that took place in Italy in the period 1996–2016, we rely on changes in daylight, both when switching between daylight saving time and winter time and across seasons, as an exogenous source of variation affecting the probability of apprehension and find that the likelihood of hit-and-run conditional on an accident taking place increases by around 20% with darkness. Our results suggest that policies increasing the likelihood of apprehension could be effective in reducing hit-and-run
Are public sector workers different? Cross-European evidence from elderly workers and retirees
Full text linkWe investigate whether public and private sector employees differ in terms of public service motivation using a representative sample of elderly workers from 12 European countries. We find that public sector workers, both those currently employed and those already retired, are significantly more prosocial; however, the difference in prosociality is explained by differences in the composition of the workforce across the two sectors, in terms of (former) workers’ education and occupation. Subsample analysis reveals that public sector former workers in education are more prosocial even after controlling for a rich set of characteristics
- …
