Governments of all kinds have frequently and increasingly turned to tax amnesties as part of their fiscal programs. An amnesty typically allows individuals or firms to pay delinquent taxes without being subject to some or all of the financial and criminal penalties that the discovery of tax evasion normally brings. Tax amnesties are a controversial revenue-raising tool. Advocates emphasize the ...

Local governments in the United States typically rely on several main sources of own-source revenues, including individual income taxes, general sales taxes, specific excise taxes, fees and charges, and local property taxes. Of these sources, the dominant is by far the property tax. According to the United States Census Bureau (http://www.census.gov/govs/estimate), local property taxes accounte...

Objective: To estimate cigarette demand and to simulate a tax policy targeted to reduce tobacco consumption. Materials and methods: Demand was estimated using a vector error correction model. Simulation exercises present the impact of a tax increase on consumption and revenues. Results: Changes in real income and the real price of cigarettes affect the demand for cigarettes in Argentina. Th...

We generalize the classic Allingham and Sandmo’s model of tax evasion considering heterogeneous agents with different degrees of tax morale and matchable, as opposed to non-matchable, income. The Tax Agency evolves its control scheme, maximizing the revenues from fines, and takes into account some minimal information on the taxpayers. We compare different audit policies and find that the most e...

Fiscal deficit concerns, especially during sever downturns, and uncertainties regarding future federal grants have underscored the importance of relying on state own-revenues including taxes. In this paper, we derive an equation for state total tax revenue-output ratio and estimate it using a panel of forty-nine states over the period 1978-97 (the sample period reflects a break in some key seri...

Computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling has provided a number of important insights about the interplay between environmental tax policy and the pre-existing tax system. In this paper, we emphasize that a labor market policy of recycling tax revenues from an environmental tax to lower employers’ non-wage labor cost depends on how the costs of labor are modeled. We propose an approach, whi...