Endogenous Corruption and Tax Evasion in a Dynamic Model

When the government provides public services necessary to production tax evasion results in some degree of income redistribution which may imply an higher or a lower level of aggregate income in the longrun. The outcome mainly depends on the burden of …scal pressure. If the tax administration is harmed by corruptibility of some agents then the performance of the economy is also a¤ected by the di¤usion of corruption, its impact depending upon the cost of detecting a bribe agreement. When such cost varies with the stage of development, as it happens if the latter determines the level of transparency, then poverty traps may emerge and the steady state level of income will depend on the initial condition. Some implications of the model are in line with recent empirical evidence.Tax evasion, corruption, public spending, poverty traps

Revisiting the one type permanent shocks hypothesis: Aggregate fluctuations in a multi-sector economy

This paper relies on sectoral-level data to interpret aggregate fluctuations of labor productivity and employment in US as due to exogenous disturbances. A shock determining permanent effect on the real investment good price may reasonably be interpreted as an investment-specific technology shock, since it mainly produces long-run effect on labor productivity in the durable goods producing sector. A transitory shock on the real investment price may instead be interpreted as a sectorneutral disturbance since it homogeneously affects the labor productivity across sectors. Finally, sectoral evidence suggests that the near-zero correlation between aggregate productivity and employment growth rates may be explained as the overall outcome of positive and negative correlations within, respectively, the durable and nondurable goods producing sectors.Technology shock, Dynamic Factor Model, Long-Run Restrictions, Sectors

A Big Push to Deter Corruption: Evidence from Italy

During the first half of the 1990s a pool of Italian judges carried out an investigation, named Mani Pulite (literally clean hands), that led many public officials to be prosecuted and convicted because of bribery and embezzlement. The impact of Mani Pulite was so much influential that since then many indicators suggest a steadily decreasing path for corruption in Italy. This paper shows that Mani Pulite was mainly effective in deterring corruption as it broke up the feed due to spending in health and social security as well as infrastructure investments, mainly those related to public buildings, sanitation, and land reclamation.Corruption, Public Investment, Deterrence

Tax Evasion and Corruption in Tax Administration

Corruption, Tax Evasion, No commitment, Maximal Fine

Corruption and Tax Evasion with Competitive Bribes

In this paper we consider a simple economy where self interested taxpayers may have incentives to evade taxes and to escape sanctions, by bribing public officials in charge for tax collection. The level of monitoring and the level of corruption are endogenously determined assuming that the price for corruption (bribe) sets at a value where expected rents in the public sector are completely dissipated in monitoring costs due to competition among public officials. In the proposed framework, larger fines for evasion will increase tax compliance with ambiguous effects on corruption while larger fine for corruption reduce corruption at the cost of reducing tax compliance. Interestingly, a utilitarian legislator will want to set maximal penalties. Intuitively, preventing corruption through fines is valuable to the planner since it reduces the amount of rent dissipation in the public sector at the cost of decreasing deterrence for the underlying offence (evasion). Finally the shadow value of deterrence is such that the level of public good provided in the economy is smaller than its first best.

Mafia and Public Spending: Evidence on the Fiscal Multiplier from a Quasi-experiment

We estimate the multiplier by relying on differences in spending in infrastructure across Italian provinces and an instrument identifying investment changes that are large and exogenous to local cyclical conditions. We derive our instrument from the an Italia law mandating the interruption of public work on evidence of ma.a in.ltration of city councils. Our IV estimates on cross sectional data allow us to address common problems in time series analysis, such as the risk of estimating spuriously high multipliers because of endogeneity and reverse causation, or the risk of confounding the e¤ects of .scal and monetary measures. While accounting for contemporaneous and lagged effects, and controlling for the direct impact of anti-ma.a measures on output, our results suggest a multiplier as high as 1.4 on impact, and 2 including dynamic effects.Government Spending, Multiplier, Instrumental Variables.

Mafia and Public Spending: Evidence on the Fiscal Multiplier from a Quasi-experiment

A law issued to combat political corruption and ma.a in.ltration of city councils in Italy has resulted in episodes of large, unanticipated, temporary contractions in local public spending. Using these episodes as instruments, we estimate the output multiplier of spending cuts at provincial level – controlling for national monetary and .scal policy, and holding the tax burden of local res- idents constant – to be 1.2. The effects of lagged spending, assumed exogenous to current output, bring this estimate up to 1.8. These results suggest that local spending adjustment may be quite consequential for local activity.Government Spending, Multiplier, Instrumental Variables, Quasi-experiment

Vertical Restraints under Asymmetric Information: On the Role of Participation Constraints

We study a manufacturer-retailer relationship where, besides the adverse selection and moral hazard components, it is explicitly considered a type-dependent participation constraint capturing the shadow cost of exclusive dealings. The welfare effects of contracts based on both retail price and sales are compared to those of contracts contingent solely upon sales. When the type-dependent outside option severely aspects the agency problem and contracts are set non-cooperatively, retail price restrictions may be detrimental to consumers. At the same time, if contracts are set cooperatively, we show that whenever sales-based contracts are observed they are detrimental to consumers.asymmetric information, countervailing incentive, double marginalization, resale price maintenance, vertical restraint, welfare

Underpricing and Firm’s Distance from Financial Centre: Evidence from three European Countries

We provide international evidence on the relationship between the extent of underpricing related to initial public offerings (IPOs) and the distance of the issuing firm from the financial centre of a country: for France, Germany and Italy, the higher the distance, the higher the level of underpricing. Under the maintained assumption that headquarters of institutional investors and underwriters are part of a financial centre, our evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that ex ante uncertainty regarding the value per share of an issuing firm increases with the firm’s physical distance from the underwriter. As financial centres are usually located in the richest areas of the countries concerned, spatial difference in the cost of equity financing may contribute to the persistence or the widening of local disparities.Asymmetric information, Distance, IPO, Underpricing

ICT adoption and diffusion in italian manufactoring firms

This paper sets out the results of econometric analysis carried out on a closed sample of 519 Italian manufacturing firms in order to determine which variables affected the probability of a firm investing in ICT in the period 2001-03, and which variables have an impact on the level of ICT investment. The estimates bear out a great many of the theoretical predictions and empirical findings, while also casting new light on the role of vertical integration in accounting for higher levels of ICT investmentFirm organisation, Information and Communication Technologies, Vertical Integration