Listening for the Heartbeat of Being: The Arts of Robert Bringhurst edited by Brent Wood and Mark Dickinson

Review of Brent Wood and Mark Dickinson\u27s Listening for the Heartbeat of Being: The Arts of Robert Bringhurst

Downward Social Mobility Across Generations: The Role of Parental Mobility and Education

Intergenerational downward social mobility is an issue of growing relevance, but there are still very few studies examining possible risk factors for dropping down the occupational hierarchy. On the basis of unique longitudinal interview and register data from Sweden, this study analyses the roles played by parental upward mobility and parental levels of education in downward mobility. Elements from cultural capital theory (CCT) are investigated as possible mechanisms for explaining the relationship between independent and dependent factors. Whereas the study fails to find support for the role of parental mobility, the parents' level of education turns out to be a powerful predictor of downward mobility. And whereas the measure of cultural capital presents a weak or non-existent relationship with the dependent variable, two attitudinal variables, employed as indicators of habitus and a possible don Quixote effect, do present a significant relationship with the risk for downward mobility. However, while the study hypothesized these attitudes to be mediating mechanisms that might explain the relationship between parental educational level and downward mobility, in the multivariate analyses the attitudinal measures instead turn out to have an independent effect in addition to the parental level of education.Intergenerational Downward Mobility, Parental Mobility, Parental Educational Level, Cultural Capital Theory, Longitudinal Study

Audit Certainty, Audit Productivity, and Taxpayer Compliance

Strategies for dealing with evasion include such standard policies as stricter enforcement (e.g., increased audit rates, more extensive audits, larger penalties). However, the exact responses of taxpayers to these enforcement measures are quite difficult to measure with existing field data, and so are not known precisely. In this paper we use experimental methods to examine how individuals respond in their compliance decisions to a "certain" probability of audit and to information concerning the "productivity" of an audit. Our design informs some individuals that their return will be audited with certainty prior to making their compliance decision, while other individuals receive information that they will not be audited; we also inform individuals of the productivity of the audit by stating how much unreported income will be discovered via the audit. We find that the announcement of audits increases the compliance rate of those who are told that they will be audited. However, the compliance rate of those who know that they will not be audited falls, and the net effect is that overall compliance falls. Working Paper 06-4

Culture Differences and Tax Morale in the United States and Europe

In recent years much research has investigated whether values, social norms, and attitudes differ across countries and whether these differences have measurable effects on economic behavior. One area in which such studies are particularly relevant is tax compliance, given both the noted differences across countries in their levels of tax compliance and the marked inability of standard economic models of taxpayer compliance to explain these differences. In the face of these difficulties, many researchers have suggested that the intrinsic motivation for individuals to pay taxes - what is sometimes termed their "tax morale" - differs across countries. However, isolating the reasons for these differences in tax morale is notoriously difficult. In a common approach, studies sometimes referred to as "cultural studies" have often relied upon controlled laboratory experiments conducted in different countries because such experiments can be set up with identical experimental protocols to allow cultural effects to be isolated. In this paper we first analyze a cross-section of individuals in Spain and the United States using the World Values Survey (WVS). In line with previous experiments, our findings indicate a significantly higher tax morale in the United States than in Spain, controlling in a multivariate analysis for additional variables. We then extend our multivariate analysis to include 14 European countries in the estimations. Our results again indicate that the United States has the highest tax morale across all countries, followed by Austria and Switzerland. We also find a strong negative correlation between the size of shadow economy and the degree of tax morale in those countries