factors influencing the incidence of bribery payouts by firms a cross country analysis this article explores micro and macro level variables that influence the incidence of bribery payouts by firms a rich data set with information from 55 countries was utilized to achieve this objective results of logit regression models indicate that there are a number of micro and macro level factors that significantly affect the incidence of bribery payouts this suggests that it is not only the characteristics of a firm but also the environment of doing business that affect the firm s bribery decision the results of this study provides information that may help firms develop strategies to reduce corruption in their respective industries and thereby improve their image of corporate social responsibility the analysis also points to possible policy directions that governments could undertake in order to reduce the incidence of bribery in their country

modeling charitable giving using a box cox standard tobit model there is a large literature investigating the determinants of charitable giving in particular price and income elasticities we find that many of the most often reported results from this literature rely on a model specification that is inappropriate when applied to recent federal tax file data we develop a standard tobit model with a box cox transformation parameter that nests a number of other specifications the box cox model yields estimates of price elasticities and expected charitable contributions that differ from those obtained using the typical specification additionally we find that the use of sample weights provides potentially important policy insights copyright 1991 by mit press

bribery in international business transactions globalization leads to cross border business transactions between societies with very different norms and regulations regarding bribery bribery in international business transactions can be seen as a function of not only the demand for such bribes in different countries but the supply or willingness to provide bribes by multinational firms and their representatives this study addresses the propensity of firms from 30 different countries to engage in international bribery the study incorporates both domestic economic development culture and domestic corruption in the supplying country and international factors those countries patterns of trade and involvement in international accords in explaining the willingness to bribe abroad the propensity to provide bribes was the lowest when corruption was not tolerated in the multinational firms home countries when the firms countries were signatories of the organization for economic cooperation and development oecd anti bribery convention and when those countries traded heavily with wealthier nations further these findings are maintained when controlling for levels of economic development and cultural values in the supplying country in terms of culture firms from high power distance countries showed a somewhat greater propensity for providing bribes in transactions with less developed nations

estimating tax noncompliance with evidence from unaudited tax returns this article estimates the degree of tax noncompliance using evidence from unaudited tax returns measurements of noncompliance are derived from the relationship between reported charitable contributions and reported income from wages and salary as compared to alternative reported income sources such as self employment farm and other small business income assuming that the source of one s income is unrelated to one s charitable inclinations and that the ratio of true income to taxable income does not vary by income source any difference in the relationship between charitable contributions and the source of income can be attributed to relative underreporting by the individual we find that the implied amount of noncompliance is significant and that it varies by source of income as well as between positive and negative values of each type of income tax evasion creates horizontal inequity and if opportunities for evasion are correlated with income complicates the attempt to achieve vertical equity evasion also imposes economic costs because taxpayers expend resources to facilitate evasion and the tax agency expends resources to contain it the equity and efficiency implications of tax evasion and optimal policy to address it depend on its magnitude and nature which for obvious reasons is difficult to ascertain this article contributes to that effort by developing a new method for estimating the extent and nature of tax noncompliance based on evidence from unaudited tax returns this evidence is derived from the relationship between reported charitable contributions and reported taxable income from various sources such as wages and salaries selfemployment nonfarm small business and farm income and is based on the assumptions that the source of one s income is unrelated to one s charitable inclinations and that the ratio of true income to taxable income does not vary by income source we find that the implied amount of noncompliance on non wageand salary income is substantial and that it varies among these sources of income as well as between positive and negative values of each type of income on average reported positive self employment nonfarm small business and farm income must be multiplied by a factor of 1 54 4 54 and 3 87 respectively in order to obtain true income even those individuals who report zero income for a specific income source but file the schedule for that source are estimated to have true positive income finally those households that report negative schedule income may actually have greater true income than those households that report positive income

filling the poverty gap multiple transfer program participation ata from the 1979 income survey development program are used to describe multiple transfer program participation and its effect on the poverty rate and the poverty gap of 87 1 million u s families and unrelated individuals 40 percent received some government transfer in april 1979 further more than 80 percent of pretransfer poor families received some transfer the benefits received by the elderly succeeded in reducing their poverty rate from 68 to 10 percent and reducing their poverty gap by 96 percent in contrast government transfers reduced the poverty rate for single parent families from a pretransfer rate of 48 percent to a posttransfer rate of 30 percent an examination of target efficiency indicates that 82 percent of all income conditioned transfers go to the pretransfer poor

understanding the demand side issues of international corruption in global business business organizations and their representatives frequently encounter corruption and may be the perpetrators victims or simply participants in such acts while international corruption has existed in multiple forms for several years many individuals companies nations and international organizations are currently attempting to reduce or eliminate corrupt acts because of their harmful effects on local economies and the quality of life of citizens several of these corruption curtailment efforts have been directed toward the supply side of corruption i e those who make corrupt payments in developing an understanding of corruption however and formulating strategies for its reduction consideration must also be given to the demand side of corruption i e those who demand and accept corrupt payments accordingly this study examined the demand side of corruption and several related factors in the categories of government economy and poverty education geography and culture analysis of these factors employed the corruption perceptions index cpi formulated annually by transparency international ti and other sources several factors in each of the five categories were found to correlate significantly with perceived corruption and strategies for addressing these issues were developed and discussed

cultivating disaster donors using data analytics nonprofit organizations use direct mail marketing to cultivate one time donors and convert them into recurring contributors cultivated donors generate much more revenue than new donors but also lapse with time making it important to steadily draw in new cultivations the direct mail budget is limited but better designed mailings can improve success rates without increasing costs we propose an empirical model to analyze the effectiveness of several design approaches used in practice based on a massive data set covering 8 6 million direct mail communications with donors to the american red cross during 2009 2011 we find evidence that mailed appeals are more effective when they emphasize disaster preparedness and training efforts over post disaster cleanup including small cards that affirm donors identity as red cross supporters is an effective strategy whereas including gift items such as address labels is not finally very recent acquisitions are more likely to respond to appeals that ask them t

household consumption of cheese an inverse hyperbolic sine double hurdle model with dependent errors the dependent double hurdle model is generalized by an inverse hyperbolic sine transformation of the dependent variable the resulting specification features a flexible parameterization accommodates heteroskedastic errors and nests a range of common limited dependent variable models results for u s household cheese consumption suggest that the homoskedastic and normal double hurdle model is misspecified income elasticities are small and vary across household groups foodstamp recipients are more responsive to income changes than nonrecipients foodstamp recipients are also less likely to consume cheese but conditional on consumption spend more than nonrecipients

cross section estimation of us demand for alcoholic beverage a flexible limited dependent variable model is used to examine us demand for alcoholic beverage parameterization and distributional assumptions of the double hurdle model cragg 1971 and tobit model tobin 1958 are rejected findings suggest that price income household composition and other characteristics have significant effects on alcohol consumption income and own price elasticities are significant but relatively small

the impact of corruption on investment predictability matters abstract this paper argues that it is not only level of corruption that affects investment but also the nature of corruption corruption regimes that are more predictable in the sense that those seeking favors from government do obtain those favors have less negative impact on investment than those that are less predictable using the data collected by world bank in preparing the world development report of 1997 we provide empirical support for the conjecture

charitable contributions and intergenerational transfers abstract this paper investigates the effects of bequest taxes and the income of children on the lifetime charitable contributions of parents using matched income tax records for parents and children the results show a positive elasticity of 0 6 for contributions with respect to the tax price of bequests the paper also finds that the income of children affects the amount that parents contribute to charity the results show a positive elasticity of up to 0 14 for contributions by parents with respect to the income of children implying that when children are better off parents are likely to increase charitable giving

wealth culture and corruption this paper examines the impact of national wealth income distribution government size and four cultural variables on the perceived level of corruption in a country the study finds that corruption is significantly correlated to gnp per capita power distance masculinity and uncertainty avoidance significant interaction effects occur in collectivistic and high power distance countries suggestions for future research are developed

tagging and taxing the optimal use of categorical and income information in designing tax transfer schemes this paper explores aspects of the optimal design of tax transfer schemes that involve elements of both tagging the use of categorical benefits and means testing income relation of benefits simulations suggest a striking qualitative dissimilarity between the group specific schedules optimally imposed on poorer and richer groups broadly speaking the optimal marginal tax rate is decreasing in income among the latter but increasing among the former this latter observation potentially important for policy runs counter to the conventional wisdom from previous simulations the reconciliation we argue lies in the role played in optimal tax design by the revenue constraint

corruption and development a review of issues in this paper we start with a discussion of some of the different denotations of the problem of corruption we then consider the ways in which the damaging consequences of corruption operate in a developing economy while not ignoring its possible redeeming features in some cases we pursue the question of why corruption is perceptibly so different in different societies and also persistent finally we examine the feasible policy issues that arise in this context

estimation of a type 2 tobit model with generalized box cox transformation this article considers estimation of a type 2 tobit model with bickel doksum transformation of the dependent variable of the regression equation the basic idea is that while the transformed depend

estimation of a two limit tobit model with generalized box cox transformation and unknown censoring thresholds this article considers estimation of a two limit tobit model with generalized box cox transformation and unknown censoring thresholds the maximum likelihood estimates of the censoring thresholds a

the private provision of public goods altruism and voluntary giving abstract a unique data set on exact giving by individual households for the support of a rural health care facility is used to examine the determinants of charitable giving including the role of altruism we examine whether a household s decision to give or not give and the amount it gives are influenced in the same or different ways by the household s characteristics and economic circumstances we also examine whether a household s altruistic history affects its current giving decisions

labour supply incentives and the taxation of family income taxing family income richard blundell and ian walker will lower marginal rates of income tax increase incentives to work the traditional theoretical argument ignores the fact that many individuals are members of households with more than one potential participant in paid employment the theory of optimal income tax is utilized to argue that the tax system should discriminate between individuals in the same household if their labour supply responses are different empirically the response of labour supply to changes in after tax wages is largest for secondary workers particularly married women hence the largest beneficial incentive effect is obtained if such individuals face lower tax rates since these individuals typically have below average pre tax earnings this suggests a simple way to implement our proposal establish a progressive income tax with individual earnings as the basis of assessment this might have additional advantages of fairness but its primary purpose would be to ensure that low earning but highly responsive individuals face low marginal tax rates while high earning but relatively unresponsive individuals face higher marginal tax rates contrary to popular wisdom a flat rate tax system would be less favourable for work incentives we illustrate this theoretical argument using an empirical model of labour supply embedded in a micro computer programme capable of simulating alternative tax systems

consistent estimation of the impact of tax deductibility on the level of charitable contributions when charitable contributions are tax deductible the marginal price of charitable giving in other consumption foregone per dollar of contributions is generally less than unity further if the income tax schedule is a progressive step function the marginal price of contributions is generally a rising step function of the level of contributions the problem of estimating a contributions demand function for individuals is therefore complicated by the spurious correlation between the level of contributions and the observed marginal price we take this econometric problem into account in estimating a contributions demand function using data from the 1972 73 consumer expenditure survey after comparing our results with those of estimation techniques used by other authors we provide evidence on the impacts of alternative tax policies on charitable giving using our estimates of the model parameters

labor supply and targeting in poverty alleviation programs the introduction of variable labor supply raises some fundamental issues in analyzing the targeting of poverty alleviation programs in developing countries it forces a reconsideration of the standard objective function which is based on income or expenditure and so makes no allowance for the effort made in earning that income the authors show that alternative views on the appropriate valuation of effort have very different implications for commodity based targeting rules they also establish a benchmark for marginal effective tax rates inclusive of benefit withdrawal in income tested schemes and show that indicator targeting rules may also have to be modified significantly when labor supply responses are recognized

optimally uniform commodity taxes taste differences and lump sum grants abstract optimal commodity taxes for an economy with many households should be at a uniform proportional rate under certain conditions these include i linear and parallel engel curves with intercepts dependent on household composition ii separability between goods and labour and iii optimal demogrants

optimal subsidy for the poor abstract this paper considers the problem of allocating an antipoverty budget subsidy among the poor in a society in an optimal and inequality reducing manner optimality requires minimization of some exogenously given poverty index on the other hand for inequality reduction a poorer poor should receive a higher amount of subsidy than a richer poor minimal progressivity and the ranks of the persons in the pre and post subsidized distributions should be the same an illustration of the general optimal subsidy function using some specific poverty index and an income distribution is provided

charitable giving by married couples revisited abstract this paper investigates the effect of gender differences and household bargaining on charitable giving i replicate the study of andreoni brown and rischall 2003 using a different data set the recently available panel study of income dynamics psid supplement on charitable giving and test the sensitivity of their results to inclusion of additional control variables and the endogeneity of the tax price of giving first focusing on singles i find that males and females have significantly different tendencies toward giving to different areas of charitable activity next comparing households in which husband and wife make a joint decision on donations with those in which couples separately decide or assign a sole decisionmaker i show that bargaining over giving increases the amount of charitable contributions by almost 7 percent

the price of international business morality twenty years under the foreign corrupt practices act last year marked the 20th anniversary of the foreign corrupt practices act fcpa of 1977 the fcpa is the first and only statute prohibiting bribery and other corrupt business practices by u s citizens and companies conducting business overseas this paper provides an overview of the fcpa during the two decades of its existence more specifically the objectives of this paper are four fold first the paper provides background information about the fcpa of 1977 and subsequent amendments in 1988 second the paper discusses the enforcement of the fcpa since its passage by examining the number of cases prosecuted under the fcpa and the respective penalties imposed third the paper discusses the economic impact of the fcpa by addressing whether the fcpa places u s firms at a competitive disadvantage fourth the paper provides public policy recommendations to expand the reach and scope of the fcpa it covers efforts to criminalize bribery through multilateral organizations such as the organization for economic cooperation and development oecd the world trade organization wto and the organization of american states oas it also covers bilateral arrangements and efforts by non governmental organizations such as transparency international

transfers targeting and poverty poverty ravi kanbur in spite of poverty alleviation programmes in the uk and the us poverty still exists in both countries and a significant share of welfare funds do not even reach the poor this is partly because funds are simply limited and shrinking but there are also fundamental problems in designing programmes of poverty alleviation maximum effectiveness would seem to suggest that transfers ought to be targeted as precisely as possible at those who most need them unfortunately this is socially costly for two reasons first means based transfers imply that the poor face a very high marginal tax rate sometimes in excess of 100 which is a major disincentive to work effort the second difficulty is the stigma attached to means testing and the low take up rate this may induce this article presents the salient features of the us and uk poverty programmes discusses the principles behind poverty alleviation and considers various reform proposals among the alternatives is the idea of shifting even further away from means testing towards contingent benefits making transfers dependent on the characteristics most often associated with poverty the author argues that the present programmes reflect some essential considerations on which it is possible to build and that wholesale reform would be inappropriate nor is it clear that public support exists for a major extension of transfers to the poor indeed existing inefficiencies may be part of the price of public acceptance of the transfer programmes already in place

geographical targeting for poverty alleviation an introduction to the special issue in the face of rising public deficits and shrinking public resources geographical targeting may be a viable way to allocate resources for poverty alleviation in developing countries efficiency can be increased and leakage to the non poor reduced substantially by targeting increasingly smaller areas this article and more generally the symposium on geographical targeting for poverty alleviation proposes several techniques for augmenting data to produce more detailed poverty maps it focuses on practical considerations in the design of geographically targeted poverty alleviation programs in particular it assesses the advantages and disadvantages of geographical targeting and describes how geographic information systems can be applied to improve poverty mapping

geographical targeting for poverty alleviation in the face of rising public deficits and shrinking public resources geographical targeting may be a viable way to allocate resources for poverty alleviation in developing countries efficiency ca

determinants of bribery in international business the cultural and economic factors corruption perceptions index cpi scores for 47 countries reported by transparency international were used to ascertain determinants of bribe taking in international business two sets of independent variables economic and cultural were used in a multiple regression analysis results indicate that bribe taking was more likely to be prevalent in countries with low per capita income and lower disparities in income distribution cultural factors such as high power distance and high masculinity in a country were also likely to be associated with high level of bribe taking both economic and cultural factors were important explanatory factors of bribery implications of the findings for combating bribery are discussed

the determinants of donative revenue flows from alumni of higher education an empirical inquiry institutions of higher education are increasingly relying upon alumni giving and endowment earnings as sources of funding this paper utilizes a new database on average alumni donations at the institutional level and institutional characteristics to explore the role that lagged institutional characteristics and policy have on subsequent donations to the institution our results confirm the noncontemporaneous effects of variations in the average scholastic achievement of matriculated students a proxy for both student quality and student socioeconomic status on subsequent donative revenue flows and indirectly address some of the open questions left by previous theoretical inquiries