Experimental Labor Markets and Policy Considerations: Incomplete Contracts and Macroeconomic Aspects

This survey focuses on experimental labor markets investigating two aspects that are important for a better understanding of labor market relations and their consequences for labor market policies. The first part of the survey is dedicated to papers that assess the prevalence of reciprocal considerations in incomplete labor contracts. The second part summarizes the relatively small but growing experimental literature exploring labor market issues in macroeconomics and public finance studying the interaction between taxation and labor market outcomes

Social Representations of Taxes and Intentions Toward Compliance

This economics and psychology study proposes to search and determine some psychological factors which could predict different behaviors toward taxes; through the intention of compliance, avoidance and evasion

Beyond behavioral economics: who is the economic man

There are two reasons to go beyond Behavioral Economics. The first reason is that humans, as presented by this school, do not explain many critical economic problems. Behavioral Economics is not an alternative paradigm to traditional economics. It is only one of the New Schools of thought, that has risen due to the failure of the contemporary Neoclassical School to show that markets have a unique maximum welfare full employment equilibrium. Therefore, in order to delimit Behavioral Economics ́ contributions we need to look at the whole paradigm in economics, which today includes: the contemporary neoclassical paradigm plus all the New Schools of thought. The second reason is that humans, as described by Behavioral Economics, are not a good representation of mans ́ evolutionary characteristics. For Behavioral Economics, humans are emotional beings which often do not know what is best for them, and need the help of the government to make the choices which are truly convenient; and they display altruistic and social cooperative behavior, even in monetary transactions. But evolutionarily we are neither design to be emotional or rational, nor to be selfish or altruistic and socially cooperative. We are design to be flexible for survival purposes, and to display a wide range of behaviors

How to Achieve Tax Compliance by the Wealthy: A Review of the Literature and Agenda for Policy

Tax compliance by the wealthy is relevant not only because their contributions are essential to maintain public budgets and social equality, but because their (non)compliance behaviour and the perceived (un)fairness of their contributions can fuel social unrest. In this paper, after giving a brief history of taxing the wealthy, we review the existing theoretical, empirical and policy literature on their tax compliance. We discuss how and why the wealthy differ from less affluent taxpayers because of specific interrelated political, social and psychological conditions. Understanding the psychological mechanisms that determine the tax compliance of the wealthy can provide policy insights on how to better integrate the wealthy in the tax system. Therefore, the present review is also a starting point for new policy approaches to increase tax compliance and tax morale among the wealthy

Fiscal Sovereignty: Reconfigurations of Value and Citizenship in Post-Financial Crisis Argentina

This dissertation examines the Argentine state's efforts to stabilize notions of value and reconstitute citizens as taxpayers and users of national currency after the financial crisis of 2001. Working with material from sixteen months of ethnographic research with federal and provincial tax authorities, neo-liberal and heterodox economists, and members of the Buenos Aires upper classes, I trace charged public debates surrounding tax payment and off-shore banking, examining both the rationalities and affective geographies guiding upper class decisions to invest in, or divest from, the nation. My dissertation foregrounds fiscal and financial relations between states and citizens as a critical nexus in the formation of state sovereignty, civic obligation, and liberal individualism. I propose that insight into the volatility of Argentine public finance requires attention to the analytical frameworks deployed by elites, including technical experts and professionals more broadly, to understand and prevent inflation, a defining question in Argentina since at least the early 1950s. The currency board was an anti-inflationary policy that, by pegging the peso to the dollar, luring foreign capital, and drastically reducing the much-vilified public sector, promised to offer "juridical security," (seguridad juridica) protecting private property rights from the vagaries of monetary instability. Its collapse, after a decade-long tenure, led Argentine authorities to declare the largest debt default in history. The dissertation examines a series of paradoxes faced by many Western nation-states that are acutely manifest in Argentina. How is the indebtedness implicit in the payment of tax, a debt that is not subject to cancellation or the reciprocal laws of market exchange, reconciled with the form of personhood C.B. Macpherson called "possessive individualism" (1962) whose lineage originated in the Lockean rights-bearing citizen? How is this paradox negotiated in light of what many scholars have noted is a reversal characteristic of modernity where the individual rather than the state is seen as the primary sovereign? How is an elusive trust in authority, upon which national currency depends, reconciled with the widely disseminated perception of economy as a set of rational processes? The dissertation argues that monetary stability hinges, in part, on the state's successful management of these paradoxes. Through multi-sited ethnography, I offer insight into discourses that condition perceptions of the proper directionality of debt between state and citizens, often expressed in views of tax as theft or gift, which critically inform the willingness of elites to store wealth in Argentine currency. Examining the new discursive links forged between accounting and accountability, I trace President Nestor Kirchner's re-signification of the debt default from a source of shame and humiliation to a triumphant gesture of sovereign refusal. I argue that this fiery anti-imperialist discourse, which garnered massive popular support and managed to reconstitute an image of the state as protector rather than thief, was critical to imposing an unprecedented `haircut' on foreign creditors in debt default negotiations. In cafés and households, I document conversations with elites angered by the widespread backlash against neo-liberalism, exasperated by the return of "populism," and persuaded that neo-liberal policies failed only because of a corrupt "political class" (clase politica). Firmly identified with a view of themselves as the primary sovereigns, and believing monetary policy should pivot around individual choice, they feel the country is unworthy of their wealth. Several ethnographic chapters document contentious encounters between tax authorities and elite subjects in seaside resort towns and gated communities, analyzing the strategies mobilized by tax administrations to re-initiate what I call the `fiscal politics of recognition.' The dissertation offers an ethnographic portrait of how elite Argentines grapple with a deep and unresolved tension between the methodological individualism shared by neo-classical economic science and Anglo-American citizenship theory, and the relational and recursive nature of monetary value, which exceeds, and cannot be encompassed by, the languages of market exchange and the social contract. The first chapter is a genealogy of the birth of public finance in relation to theories of liberal individualism in Great Britain, documenting the process through which affectively entangled creditor-debtor relations between state and subjects, while constitutive of civic obligation, nation-building, and trust in modern state economies, were "purified," (Latour 1993) subjected to disciplinary amnesia. A historical chapter considers how the rarefied sciences of economy traveled to South Atlantic shores to be incorporated into a very distinct historical and geo-political assemblage, one where the fiscal and financial entanglements, disavowed but nonetheless exerting a spectral presence in Western European countries, were absent. The sequence and trajectory of state building in Argentina lead to an accentuated version of the paradox discussed above, making it especially difficult to perceive money, not only as a medium of exchange, but as a pathway of recognition, constitutive of economic obligation. Despite a resurgence of interest in the question of sovereignty in critical theory, scholarship on taxation -- by all accounts a defining feature of sovereignty -- is surprisingly limited, often treated as an afterthought in work on economic anthropology and globalization. Building on work in political and economic anthropology on market and fiscal subjectivities, this research focuses on citizens in their capacities as debtors and creditors of the state, providing insight into a fragile fiscal bond that, despite its centrality, has received little attention in anthropologies of modern capitalism. Offering new analytic tools and re-valorizing older ones, this dissertation elucidates the relationships among value, national belonging, and economic insecurity, made newly visible in the wake of financial crisis

Making Fenians: The Transnational Constitutive Rhetoric of Revolutionary Irish Nationalism, 1858-1876

This dissertation traces the constitutive rhetorical strategies of revolutionary Irish nationalists operating transnationally from 1858-1876. Collectively known as the Fenians, they consisted of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the United Kingdom and the Fenian Brotherhood in North America. Conceptually grounded in the main schools of Burkean constitutive rhetoric, it examines public and private letters, speeches, Constitutions, Convention Proceedings, published propaganda, and newspaper arguments of the Fenian counterpublic. It argues two main points. First, the separate national constraints imposed by England and the United States necessitated discursive and non-discursive rhetorical responses in each locale that made it near impossible to sustain transnational consubstantiality for the movement. Second, North American Fenian strategies to gain sovereign recognition for Ireland relied on and helped to further substantiate the palliative Constitutional wishes of equality that undergirded the racial and settler inequalities of the United States. After establishing the exigency and framework for the project, Chapter 2 examines the transnational attempts by Fenian leadership to constitute the Irish nation in the diaspora across existing national borders. It argues that, despite the shared vision and motives, the separate national constraints negotiated by each arm of the movement made it impossible to maintain a shared strategy for achieving Irish freedom. Chapter 3 then focuses on the Constitutions created by the North American organization in order to constitute Irish sovereignty, demonstrating how the scenic conditions wrought by these Constitutional enactments contributed to a legitimacy crisis that led to the schism in the Fenian Brotherhood and paved the way for multiple failed invasions of Canada. Chapter 4 examines the constitutive rhetorical strategies of The Fenians\u27 Progress, a propaganda tract used by the wing that sought to invade Canada, and limns the rhetorics of respectability this faction employed as they appealed to the U.S. for recognition of Fenian belligerent status. Chapter 5 juxtaposes the rhetorics of skirmishing and settling in The Irish World in the mid-1870s in the wake of the failed Canadian invasions, tracing the rhetorics of settler solidarity these otherwise anti-imperialist Irish-Americans invoke in print. It concludes by discussing the Fenian case\u27s implications for rhetorical theory