Explaining Italian tax compliance: A historical analysis

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Oxford University Press via the link in this record

More bang for your buck: tax compliance in the United States and Italy

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this record.I investigate the relationship between perception of public institutions and tax com- pliance using a large tax compliance laboratory experiment conducted in Italy and the United States. In the rst test, I conduct a simple tax compliance game to uncover that given the exact same decisions, contributions to the public good do not di er between Italy and the United States. Secondly, I ask participants to pay taxes to their national government, pension fund, and re department. In these rounds, behaviors diverge with Italian participants complying signi cantly less than Americans. Theoretically, I provide evidence demonstrating that how individuals perceive their institutions is a crucial component of the tax compliance decision. Methodologically, I provide a unique experiment, which can help us to better explain cross-country variation in tax compliance, by asking subjects to make country-specific tax decisions.Funds for this research were provided by the European Research Council (Grant Agreement No. 295675 )

Trust in Government: Narrowing the Ideological Gap over the Federal Budget

This is the final version. Available from Journal of Behavioral Public Administration via the DOI in this record.Do liberals and conservatives who trust the government have more similar preferences regarding the federal budget than liberals and conservatives who do not? Prior research has shown that the ideological gap over spending increases and tax cuts narrows at high levels of trust in government. We extend this literature by examining whether the dampening effect of trust operates when more difficult budgetary decisions (spending cuts and tax increases) have to be made. Although related, a tax increase demands greater material and ideological sacrifice from individuals than tax cuts. The same logic can be applied to support for spending cuts. We test the trust-as-heuristic hypothesis using measures of revealed budgetary preferences from a population-based survey containing an embedded budget simulation. Our findings show that trusting liberals and conservatives share similar preferences toward spending cuts and tax increases, adding an important empirical addendum to a theory based on sacrificial costs.European Research CouncilEconomic and Social Research Council (ESRC