There is a heated debate on the merits of legalizing certain illegal, harmful and corrupting activities (such as trade in illicit drugs), but little theoretical insights on the consequences for optimal enforcement policies and corruption. We propose a model where the government hires law enforcers to report those who engage in a harmful activity. Offenders are allowed to respond by offering bri...

I investigate how the capital structure of firms is affected by uncertainty about the legal outcomes of corporate tax law. I create a simple model in which firms choose to either avoid taxes aggressively or conservatively, based on enforcement of laws and uncertainty about outcomes of the legal process. This theory shows under which conditions firms will avoid conservatively by using debt tax s...

Until recently, the four Social Security trust funds were, by law, kept completely separate, each having its own sources of revenue and paying benefits to specific groups of entitled persons. The original Social Security Act (Public Law 74-271, enacted on August 14, 1935) created the Old-Age Reserve Account, which was later renamed the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund. ...

SINCE THE PASSAGE of California’s Proposition 13 in 1978, tax and expenditure limitation measures (TELs) have been widely used for altering the revenue systems of state and local governments (Joyce and Mullins 1991). Oregon’s Ballot Measure 5, a TEL passed in 1990, provides an opportunity to (1) identify some of the effects of a TEL on local governments and (2) examine how local officials try t...

In the international integration, economic changes have had a strong influence on domestic and foreign enterprises in Vietnam regarding tax compliance. The more domestic and international activities occur, the more the enterprises have to take advantage of tax evasion and tax avoidance. By using historical methodologies, this paper tries to point out the shortcomings of the current regulations ...

ed =312141; ARMIN FALK ET AL., INFORMAL SANCTIONS 31-32 (U. of Zurich, Inst. for Empirical Research in Econ., Working Paper No. 59, 2000), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/ delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID245568_code001011130.pdf?abstractid=245568 (testing for reciprocal behavior in Internet and classroom laboratory experiments and concluding that reciprocity decreases with increased social distance but is not ...

BACKGROUND Native American tribes, as sovereign nations, are exempt from state tobacco excise taxation, and self-govern on-reservation activity in the USA. Under Federal law, state excise taxes are owed by non-members purchasing tobacco on tribal land, but states are limited in how they enforce or collect these taxes. This study highlights the various policy approaches that states have taken to...