Fiscal Illusion and Progressive Taxation with Retrospective Voting

We consider the tax progressivity decision of a rent‐maximizing government when voters’ perceptions of the tax price of public goods are biased by cognitive anomalies (i.e., fiscal illusion), and the electorate opts for re‐appointing or for dismissing the incumbent according to a retrospective voting logic. Given electoral and constitutional constraints, we show that the design of the tax system can be sensibly affected by fiscal illusion within the population of voters. Specifically, we find that (i) the tax system is more (less) progressive when taxes and public expenditures are perceived less (more), and (ii) an increase in the median voter’s income may positively or negatively affect tax progressivity depending on the nature (pessimistic or optimistic) of fiscal illusion. The impact of fiscal illusion on tax progressivity is validated by econometric analysis

The Italian Reform of the academic recruitment system: an appraisal of ANVUR and CUN benchmarks for assessing candidates and commissioners

The present study is aimed at contributing to the ongoing debate about the implications of the incoming recruitment system as proposed by Law 240/2010 (Gelmini's reform). For this purpose, the main implications of the two alternative criteria respectively proposed by the National Agency for the Evaluation of the University System and Research (ANVUR) and the National University Council (Consiglio Universitario Nazionale - CUN) are investigated for assessing candidates and commissioners admitted to apply for the national scientific approval of the Italian academic recruitment system. Using the sample of 1327 Italian academic economists (secs p/01, p/02, p/03) enrolled for the academic year 2011-12, the analysis provides two simulations. First, the thresholds for both ANVUR and CUN criteria as well as the resulting shares of "qualified" candidates and commissioners are computed. Second, the impact of the new eligibility criteria on the academic competitions (p01, p02, p03) that occurred in 2005 is simulated under the assumption that behavioral responses are absent. The findings suggest that (i) CUN criteria provide more selective benchmarks than ANVUR ones, and (ii) in the absence of behavioral responses, the new system of recruitment is expected to remarkably affect the profile of the Italian academic system

Certainty equivalent citation: a generalized class of citation indexes

Citation indexes have attracted the interest of many researchers in the recent years. In this paper we propose a new class of citation indexes which is shown to generalize most of the citation indexes in the existing literature (h-, g-, f-, t-index). The class of indexes is obtained borrowing from the notion of ``certainty equivalent income'' or ``equally distributed equivalent income'' which has been largely implemented in the field of risk and inequality measurement. As a result citation orderings are shown to depend on a parameter of concentration/dispersion aversion capturing the value judgments of the decision-maker with respect to the distribution of citations. In order to verify the sensitivity of scientific productivity orderings with respect to concentration/dispersion aversion, an empirical application to a representative sample of Italian academic economists is presented

Maximal Fines and Corruption: An Experimental Study on Illegal Waste Disposal

Corruption is known to be one of the real life situations which may jeopardize the effectiveness of fines in deterring crime. We present a model of ‘crime with corruption’ by which both the dilution of crime deterrence due to corruption, as well as the possibility of crime encouraging fines are formally highlighted. More importantly, by running an experiment on a subject pool of students for the case of illegal waste disposal, we provide experimental evidence on the validity of our theoretical predictions. We find that increasing fine rate may become crime encouraging or at least ineffective, beyond a context-specific fine threshold. In a policy perspective, we suggest that the optimal design of a crime-deterring sanctioning system must simultaneously account for both corruption practices and anti-corruption policies

A Note on Complaints and Deprivation

In the existing literature a separating line is drawn between deprivation and complaint-based inequality indices. In this paper we show that deprivation-based inequality orderings (eg. Gini index) can be replicated through the generalization of complaint-based inequality indices