the demographic transition and the emergence of sustained economic growth the demographic transition that swept the world in the course of the last century has been identified as one of the prime forces in the transition from stagnation to growth the unprecedented increase in population growth during the early stages of industrialization was ultimately reversed and the demographic transition brought about a significant reduction in fertility rates and population growth in various regions of the world enabling economies to convert a larger share of the fruits of factor accumulation and technological progress into growth of income per capita this paper examines various mechanisms that have been proposed as possible triggers for the demographic transition assessing their empirical validity and their potential role in the transition from stagnation to growth jel o11 o14 o33 o40 j11 j13

an examination of ethical influences on the work of tax practitioners as a contribution to the continuing debate about tax practitioner ethics this paper explores the main streams of western ethical thought that are relevant to tax practitioners work most typically deontology and consequentialism although virtue ethics and distributive justice are also considered it then goes on to consider the impact of such ethical influences on the professional ethical codes of conduct that govern tax practitioners work with specific reference to the uk and ireland and attempts to unravel the complex work and ethical environment of the practice of tax in terms of tax compliance and tax avoidance the paper then examines the prior studies on tax practitioners and ethics and the type of dilemmas that practitioners face in the context of their work the paper proceeds to examine empirically the extent to which tax practitioners take a consequentialist versus a deontological approach in their reasoning about moral dilemmas this is carried out by an innovative use of the defining issues test

urbanization fertility and child education in sub saharan africa abstract using individual level survey data we show that the urbanization process in today s sub saharan africa is associated with the fertility transition and increased investment in child education this is consistent with the experience of the western economies during their transition from a post malthusian towards a modern growth regime the use of individual level data allows us to analyze structural rural urban differences holding constant age and regional characteristics which are potentially confounding factors in regional and country level regressions

bilateral trading with naive traders we introduce naive traders in bilateral trading these traders report their true types in direct mechanisms and bid ask their values costs in auctions we show that by expropriating naive traders in direct mechanisms the mechanism designer can subsidize additional trades by strategic traders and improve efficiency in fact complete expropriation of naive traders is a necessary condition for constrained efficiency a significant implication is that in the presence of naive traders ex post individually rational mechanisms are not constrained efficient in contrast if the traders must use a given mechanism then the introduction of naive traders has an ambiguous effect on efficiency

screening ethics when honest agents care about fairness we analyze a principal s ability to discriminate between honest and dishonest agents who have private information about the circumstances of the exchange honest agents reveal circumstances truthfully as long as the mechanism is suciently fair the probability that an equilibrium allocation is chosen by an agent who is lying should not be too large without intolerance for lying the agent is given proper incentives if dishonest and zero rent if honest with even a small intolerance for lying the optimal mechanism is discontinuously altered it may still involve ethics screening whereby some allocation chosen by a dishonest agent is never chosen by an honest agent it happens either when the dishonest is overstating circumstances or when the principal is forced to allow for some suboptimal announcements due to an excessive intolerance for lying with limited intolerance for lying ethics screening allows for doing better than in the standard setup where the agent is dishonest with certainty even if honesty is unlikely however if intolerance for lying is too strong the principal cannot improve upon the standard setup

cheap children and the persistence of poverty this paper develops a theory of fertility that offers an explanation for the persistence of poverty within and across countries if educated individuals have a comparative advantage in raising educated children then parental fertility choice is shown to give rise to a poverty trap in which the poor choose high fertility rates with low investment in child quality moreover the impact of child quality choice on economic performance is amplified by the diluting effect of higher fertility on physical capital accumulation the theory proposes insights regarding the effects of inequality globalisation and life expectancy on economic growth and demographic transitions this paper develops a theory of fertility and child educational choice that offers an explanation for the persistence of poverty within and across countries the joint determination of the quality education and quantity of children in a household is studied under the key assumption that individuals productivity as teachers increases with their own human capital in contrast the minimum time cost associated with raising a child regardless of the child s quality the quantity cost is not affected by parental education as a result the price of child quantity relative to the price of child quality increases with individuals wages in particular for low wage individuals for whom the opportunity cost of time is low children of minimal quality are cheap this assumption therefore generates a comparative advantage for the poor in child quantity whereas high wage educated individuals have a comparative advantage in raising quality children consistent with the well known evidence poor households thus choose relatively high fertility rates with relatively low investment in their offspring s education and therefore their offspring are poor as well in contrast high income families choose low fertility rates with high investment in education and therefore high income persists in the dynasty evidence from the us provided by hanushek 1992 suggests that a trade off between quantity and quality of children does indeed exist hanushek argues that movements in family size could explain over half the variance in some test scores and that the elasticity of achievements with respect to the number of children in the family is 0 03 implying that the annual achievement growth of each child in a family will fall about 2 when a second child is added and about 0 5 when a sixth child is added 1

the culture of corruption tax evasion and economic growth this study uses a dynamic general equilibrium model to quantify the effects of corruption and tax evasion on fiscal policy and economic growth the model is calibrated to match estimates of tax evasion in developing countries the calibrated model is able to generate reasonable predictions for net tax rates the corruption associated with public investment projects and the negative correlation between corruption and tax revenue the presence of corruption and evasion is shown to have significant but not large negative effects on economic growth the relatively moderate effects help explain the absence of a robust negative correlation between growth and corruption in cross country data the model also implies that cracking down on tax evasion before addressing corruption can be a bad idea and that higher wages for public officials can improve welfare jel h3 o4

consumer information and competition between nonprofit and for profit nursing homes this paper develops implications of arrow s hypothesis that nonprofit organizations are prevalent in health care because of quality uncertainty the model analyzes the ability of nonprofits to mitigate market failures created by asymmetric information in an environment characterized by potential competition from both explicitly for profit firms and for profits in disguise profit motivated firms who obtain nonprofit status in order to exploit the perceived trustworthiness of the nonprofit sector under certain conditions it is shown that nonprofit status can serve as a credible signal of quality and that nonprofits can decrease the underprovision of quality both by providing high quality services and indirectly via a spillover effect on quality in the for profit sector applicability to long term care and implications for empirical research and policy towards nonprofits in health care are discussed

representative evidence on lying costs abstract a central assumption in economics is that people misreport their private information if this is to their material benefit several recent models depart from this assumption and posit that some people do not lie or at least do not lie maximally these models invoke many different underlying motives including intrinsic lying costs altruism efficiency concerns or conditional cooperation to provide an empirically validated microfoundation for these models it is crucial to understand the relevance of the different potential motives we measure the extent of lying costs among a representative sample of the german population by calling them at home in our setup participants have a clear monetary incentive to misreport misreporting cannot be detected reputational concerns are negligible and altruism efficiency concerns or conditional cooperation cannot play a role yet we find that aggregate reporting behavior is close to the expected truthful distribution suggesting that lying costs are large and widespread further lab experiments show that this result is not driven by the mode of communication

from the lab to the field a review of tax experiments tax experiments have been gaining momentum in recent years although this literature dates back several decades with new developments in methods and data availability tax experiments have gradually moved away from lab settings and towards the field this movement from the lab to the field has happened against the background of the credibility revolution in applied economics which has seen more rigorous methods applied to policy relevant questions and of the availability to researchers of administrative data from tax returns these developments have allowed significant advances in the experimental literature on tax compliance this paper reviews this literature giving particular attention to field experiments using administrative data but putting them in the broader context of the compliance literature a particular effort is made to take a global perspective in a literature that is only recently seeing the emergence of evidence from africa latin america and asia

political commitment institutional capacity and tax policy reform in tanzania abstract the early literature on structural adjustment programs concentrated on the types of economic reforms required and more recent literature addresses the political and institutional dimensions of economic policy reform this paper presents a framework for analyzing the interaction between politics notably the political commitment to reform and institutions especially administrative capacity in implementing reform the framework is applied to tax reform and trade liberalization in tanzania a number of conclusions are drawn regarding the appropriate design and sequence of a reform program to increase the likelihood of effective implementation given the policy environment and political and institutional changes required

the historical fertility transition a guide for economists the historical fertility transition is the process by which much of europe and north america went from high to low fertility in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this transformation is central to recent accounts of long run economic growth prior to the transition women bore as many as eight children each and the elasticity of fertility with respect to incomes was positive today many women have no children at all and the elasticity of fertility with respect to incomes is zero or even negative this paper discusses the large literature on the historical fertility transition focusing on what we do and do not know about the process i stress some possible misunderstandings of the demographic literature and discuss an agenda for future work jel i12 j13 n30

health and agricultural productivity evidence from zambia we evaluate the productivity effects of investment in preventive health technology through a randomized controlled trial in rural zambia in the experiment access to subsidized bed nets was randomly assigned at the community level 516 farmers were followed over a one year farming period we find large positive effects of preventative health investment on productivity among farmers provided with access to free nets harvest value increased by us 76 corresponding to about 14 7 of the average output value while only limited information was collected on farming inputs shifts in the extensive and the intensive margins of labor supply appear to be the most likely mechanism underlying the productivity improvements observed

life expectancy and human capital investments evidence from maternal mortality declines longer life expectancy should encourage human capital accumulation since a longer time horizon increases the value of investments that pay out over time previous work has been unable to determine the empirical importance of this life expectancy effect due to the difficulty of isolating it from other effects of health on education we examine a sudden drop in maternal mortality risk in sri lanka between 1946 and 1953 which creates a sharp increase in life expectancy for school age girls without contemporaneous effects on health and which also allows for the use of boys as a control group using additional geographic variation we find that the 70 reduction in maternal mortality risk over the sample period increased female life expectancy at age 15 by 4 1 female literacy by 2 5 and female years of education by 4 0 authors

screening when some agents are nonstrategic does a monopoly need to exclude we characterize the optimal screening mechanism for a monopolist facing consumers with privately known demands some of whom have limited abilities to misrepresent their preferences we show that consumers with better abilities to misrepresent information benefit from the presence of consumers who lack such abilities whenever the fraction of the latter group is positive there is no exclusion the firm supplies a positive quantity of the good to all consumers whose valuations exceed marginal cost of production our analysis is motivated by the evidence indicating that some individuals have limited ability to misrepresent themselves and imitate others

chronic disease burden and the interaction of education fertility and growth abstract this study considers the eradication of hookworm disease from the american south circa 1910 as a test of the quantity quality q q framework of fertility eradication was principally a shock to the price of quality because of three factors hookworm i depresses the return to human capital investment ii had a very low case fatality rate and iii had negligible prevalence among adults consistent with the q q model we find a significant decline in fertility associated with eradication

mortality reductions educational attainment and fertility choice this paper develops a model where reductions in mortality are the main force behind economic development the model generates a pattern of changes similar to the demographic transition where gains in life expectancy at birth are followed by reductions in fertility and increases in the rate of human capital accumulation the onset of the transition is characterized by a critical level of life expectancy at birth which marks the movement of the economy from a malthusian equilibrium to an equilibrium with investments in human capital and the possibility of long run growth

corruption fertility and human capital abstract we build an overlapping generations model in which reproductive households face a child quantity child quality trade off and bureaucrats are delegated with the task of delivering public services that support the accumulation of human capital by integrating the theoretical analyses of endogenous growth corruption and fertility choices we show that the negative relation between fertility and economic development may also be affected by differences in the magnitude of bureaucratic corruption

an econometric analysis of income tax evasion and its detection this article presents an econometric analysis of income tax evasion and its detection based on individual level data drawn from the internal revenue service 1982 and 1985 taxpayer compliance measurement programs i specify a model consisting of two equations the first measures the extent of evasion the second the fraction of evasion detected the empirical analysis explores the effects of income the marginal tax rate and various socioeconomic characteristics on filer evasion behavior and it assesses the variability in detection rates among irs examiners finally i use the empirical estimates to construct new estimates of the income tax gap the new estimates are very close to the previous irs estimates

structural change and the fertility transition this paper provides new insights into the relationship between structural change and the fertility transition we exploit the spread of an agricultural pest in the american south in the 1890s as pl

financial incentives and endogenous enforcement in china s pollution levy system abstract using data from 3000 chinese factories we estimate an econometric model of endogenous enforcement in which factories levy rates and emissions are jointly determined by the interaction of local and national enforcement factors abatement costs and regulator manager negotiations that are sensitive to plant characteristics our results demonstrate the significant deterrent impact of a system that combines progressive financial penalties and self reporting with few options for contesting regulatory decisions despite the prevalence of state enterprises and developing country conditions in china despite central pressure for uniformity in enforcement we find great regional diversity that reflects local conditions we also find that pollution control through financial incentives has a much greater impact on production processes than on end of pipe abatement

disease and development the effect of life expectancy on economic growth we exploit the major international health improvements from the 1940s to estimate the effect of life expectancy on economic performance we construct predicted mortality using preintervention mortality rates from various diseases and dates of global interventions predicted mortality has a large impact on changes in life expectancy starting in 1940 but no effect before 1940 using predicted mortality as an instrument we find that a 1 percent increase in life expectancy leads to a 1 7 2 percent increase in population life expectancy has a much smaller effect on total gdp however consequently there is no evidence that the large increase in life expectancy raised income per capita

hierarchical design and enforcement of income tax policies abstract a hierarchical model of tax compliance is studied in which the government selects a tax policy and then delegates the responsibility to collect taxes to the irs there is a fixed distribution of income in the economy individuals differ by their income which is known niether to the government nor to the irs we completely characterize the solution to the irs s revenue maximizing problem when taxpayers are risk neutral the optimal auditing policy divides the reported incomes into at most three groups we show that the government provides a smaller budget to the irs than the irs would wish

disease and development evidence from hookworm eradication in the american south this study evaluates the economic consequences of the successful eradication of hookworm disease from the american south the hookworm eradication campaign c 1910 began soon after i the discovery that a variety of health problems among southerners could be attributed to the disease and ii the donation by john d rockefeller of a substantial sum to the effort the rockefeller sanitary commission rsc surveyed infection rates in the affected areas eleven southern states and found that an average of forty percent of school aged children were infected with hookworm the rsc then sponsored treatment and education campaigns across the region follow up studies indicate that this campaign substantially reduced hookworm disease almost immediately the sudden introduction of this treatment combines with the cross area differences in pre treatment infection rates to form the basis of the identification strategy areas with higher levels of hookworm infection prior to the rsc experienced greater increases in school enrollment attendance and literacy after the intervention this result is robust to controlling for a variety of alternative factors including differential trends across areas changing crop prices shifts in certain educational and health policies and the effect of malaria eradication no significant contemporaneous results are found for adults who should have benefited less from the intervention owing to their substantially lower prior infection rates a long term follow up of affected cohorts indicates a substantial gain in income that coincided with exposure to hookworm eradication i also find evidence that eradication increased the return to schooling

pareto efficient income taxation under costly monitoring abstract this paper studies the problem of pareto efficient fiscal policies when labour supply is elastic and the government has no a priori information on income earned the model is a two class economy with an official and an unofficial labour market official income is taxed non linearly while unofficial income is only observable after a costly audit upon which it is taxed at an exogenous penalty rate after characterisation of the pareto efficient audit and tax policies it is verified how these policies react to a higher government revenue requirement an increase in the penalty rate a stronger ambition to redistribute in the two last scenarios the effect on the marginal tax and the audit rate is shown to decompose into a government revenue effect and a substitution effect a numerical example shows that the substitution effects are of minor importance suggesting that first intuition about the best way for a government to cope with increased evasion opportunities substituting auditing effort for high marginal tax rates sketches only part of the picture

income distribution and equilibrium multiplicity in a stigma based model of tax evasion abstract this paper incorporates continuous income distribution into the stigma based model of tax compliance the paper investigates the effect of income distribution on the existence of multiple equilibria and characterizes the conditions under which multiple equilibria emerge precisely multiple equilibria exist if taxpayer incomes are sufficiently homogeneous because the social coordination effect dominates the individual characteristics effect numerical simulations show that the main proposition is robust to allowing two step audit policies on the part of the tax agency under the presumption that the best or good equilibrium is selected whenever there are multiple equilibria as a byproduct the effect of various forms of tax reforms on the optimal two step audit policy the equilibrium compliance and fiscal revenue is analyzed

malthus was right explaining a millennium of stagnation abstract we develop a simple malthusian growth model with continuous productivity growth and derive the stationary steady state equilibrium we show that linearisation around the steady state gives an empirically tractable model of malthusian wage and population behaviour using the familiar concept of convergence our empirical strategy addresses the concern in the literature over model identification and inconsistent parameter estimates based on newly constructed population data we estimate wage and population growth models using panel data for up to 17 countries from 900ce to 1870ce our results provide the first time series evidence of a strong malthusian trap that was pervasive across countries and time before the 19th century industrial revolution

plea bargaining with the irs extensions and further results abstract chu journal of public economics 41 1990 319 333 proposes a tax scheme called fatota under which taxpayers are given the choice between paying a fixed amount of taxes and thus being exempted from tax audit or paying only what taxpayers claim they owe and being subject to tax audits for possible evasion in this paper we extend chu s finding with regard to the pareto improving property of fatota to a more general setting including nonlinear tax penalty schedules complicated audit rules and endogenous labor supply we also show that any tax system in which the highest income taxpayer faces audit risk and or tax distortion can be pareto improved upon by the introduction of fatota we relate this result to seade s journal of public economics 7 1977 203 235 celebrated finding in the optimal taxation literature that any income tax schedule with a positive marginal tax rate at the top of the scale can be replaced by another tax schedule which is strictly pareto improving

strength and commitment of the state it takes two to tango a case study of economic reforms in argentina in the 1990s this paper tries to answer the question why radical institutional reforms became reality in argentina a country devastated by economic and political catastrophies hardly a decade ago it uses a framework of both strength and commitment of the state as crucial determinants of the quality of economic institutions such as property and contract rights in particular the personality and credibility of carlos menem as argentine president due to his capabilities as political organizer while political opposition was weak to the institutional dominance of the presidency over legislature and judiciary in argentina s political system and to a fundamental restoration of the state are all seen to be responsible for strengthening the central government in argentina and thus allowed a radical top down and quasi authoritarian reform policy the commitment of the state not to abide the institutions itself has been enhanced by the elimination of discretion over monetary policy by way of establishing a currency board by privatization as well as by improving transparency and information policy however the actual lack of commitment with regard to democratic control mechanisms represents a permanent threat of the economic reforms already realized so far

life expectancy and human capital evidence from the international epidemiological transition exploiting preintervention variation in mortality from various infectious diseases together with the time variation arising from medical breakthroughs in the late 1940s and the 1950s this study examines how a large positive shock to life expectancy influenced the formation of human capital within countries during the second half of the 20th century the results establish that the rise in life expectancy was behind a significant part of the increase in human capital over this period according to the baseline estimate for one additional year of life expectancy years of schooling increase by 0 17 year moreover the evidence suggests that declines in pneumonia mortality are the underlying cause of this finding indicating that improved childhood health increases human capital investments

contract design and costly verification games abstract in this paper the signalling subgame in costly verification models is studied in the context of the investor entrepreneur contract without assuming the possibility of commitment to verification it is shown that the game has a unique perfect bayesian equilibrium in mixed strategies implying that truth telling and deterministic verification are not an equilibrium behavior when the entire game starting from the stage of contract design is considered it is shown that the contract designed by the informed entrepreneur results in less verification cost than the one designed by the uninformed investor this could be taken as a normative criterion based upon which institutional arrangements as regards the distribution of bargaining initiative are to be designed

do labor market opportunities affect young women s work and family decisions experimental evidence from india do labor market opportunities for women affect marriage and fertility decisions we provided three years of recruiting services to help young women in randomly selected rural indian villages get jobs in the business process outsourcing industry because the industry was so new at the time of the study there was almost no awareness of these jobs allowing us in effect to exogenously increase women s labor force opportunities from the perspective of rural households we find that young women in treatment villages were significantly less likely to get married or have children during this period choosing instead to enter the labor market or obtain more schooling or postschool training women also report wanting to have fewer children and to work more steadily throughout their lifetime consistent with increased aspirations for a career copyright 2012 oxford university press

cause of death and development in the us abstract exploiting cross state variation in infectious causes of death along with time variation arising from medical innovations toward the middle of the twentieth century this study examines the consequences of a positive health shock in the us it establishes that states with higher levels of mortality from infectious causes prior to the onset of the era of big medicine experienced greater increases in life expectancy population and total gdp after its onset whereas per capita gdp remained largely unchanged together the evidence suggests that the rise in life expectancy had no significant effect on living standards in the us during the time period 1940 1980 these results are robust to controlling for initial health and initial economic conditions

tax progressivity income distribution and tax non compliance this article examines the determinants of tax non compliance when we recognise the existence of an imperfectly competitive tax advice industry supplying schemes which help taxpayers reduce their tax liability we apply a traditional industrial organisation framework to model the behaviour of this industry this tells us that an important factor determining the equilibrium price and hence the level of noncompliance is the convexity of the demand schedule we show that in this context this convexity is affected by the distribution of pre tax income the progressivity of the tax schedule and the way in which monitoring and penalties vary with income it is shown that lower pre tax income inequality as well as a less progressive tax code may cause more tax minimisation activities therefore the frequently advocated policy of reducing the highest tax rate may fail as a policy directed at improving tax discipline one way of offsetting the possible harm to tax compliance from a less progressive tax could be an adjustment of the penalty and monitoring functions

honesty on the streets a field study on newspaper purchasing many publishers use an honor system for selling newspapers in the street we conducted a field experiment to study honesty in this market finding that a moral reminder increases the level of honesty in payments whereas the same message has no effect on whether one is honest reminding customers of the legal norm has no effect we argue that these results are consistent with a preference for honesty based on an internalized social norm auxiliary evidence suggests that the moral message remains effective when it is posted for longer periods and even when it is removed again authors abstract

understanding economic policy reform one of the eventual consequences of the global debt crisis was a wave of market oriented economic reforms this paper discusses the state of our knowledge on the political economy of this process why were inefficient and often unsustainable policies maintained for so long why are so many governments reforming now after decades of adherence to policies of an opposite kind have the reformers internalized the correct lessons from the east asian experience finally are there any helpful rules for reformers to follow in guiding their policies through complicated political terrain

mortality versus morbidity in the demographic transition abstract the link between the mortality and epidemiological transitions is used to identify the effect of the former on the fertility transition a mortality transition that is not accompanied by improving morbidity causes slower demographic and economic change in a model where children may die from infectious disease childhood health affects human capital and noninfectious disease related adult mortality when child mortality falls from lower prevalence as it did in western europe labor productivity improves fertility falls and the economy prospers when it falls mainly from better cures as it has in sub saharan africa survivors are less healthy and there is little economic growth the model can quantitatively explain sub saharan africa s experience more generally it shows that the commonly used indicator life expectancy at birth is a poor predictor of population health and economic growth unless morbidity falls with mortality

honesty and evasion in the tax compliance game conventional models of tax compliance emphasize that taxpayers make strategic tax reports underreporting income to the extent that this behavior is functionally rewarded in contrast to this view considerable empirical evidence suggests that many taxpayers are inherently honest reporting truthfully regardless of the incentive to cheat in this article we build a game theoretic model of tax compliance that includes both honest and potentially dishonest taxpayers we show that including honest taxpayers significantly alters the model leading to much improved empirical predictions and somewhat different and novel policy implications

corporate income tax evasion and managerial preferences this paper investigates the role of managerial preferences in shaping corporate income tax evasion using noncompliance with the personal income tax as a measure of taste for evasion the empirical results from a sample of corporate income tax returns show that managerial preferences play an important role in determining noncompliance with the corporate income tax basic sample tabulations show that when compared to compliant firms noncompliant firms are three times more likely to be managed by executives who have understated personal taxes in addition results from multivariate analyses suggest that the amount of underreported income is significantly higher in the presence of such executives

income shocks contraceptive use and timing of fertility abstract this paper examines the relationship between income shocks and fertility decisions using panel data from tanzania we estimate the impact of agricultural shocks on pregnancies births and contraception use the likelihood of pregnancies and childbirth are significantly lower for households that experience a crop shock furthermore women have significantly higher contraception use after crop losses the increase in contraceptive use comes almost entirely from traditional contraceptive methods such as abstinence and the rhythm method we argue that these changes in behavior are the result of deliberate decisions of the households rather than the shocks effects on other factors that influence fertility such as women s health status the absence or migration of a spouse the dissolution of partnerships or the number of hours worked we also show that although traditional contraceptives have low overall efficacy households with a strong incentive to postpone fertility are very effective at using them

the effects of child mortality changes on fertility choice and parental welfare empirical studies have overwhelmingly shown that a lower child mortality rate leads to lower fertility yet it has not been possible to satisfactorily analyze this relationship in even the simplest theoretical models this paper attempts to bridge this gap between theory and the empirical literature the paper also presents results on the effects of child mortality changes on parental welfare the analysis captures the dynamic stochastic feature of fertility choice subsumes other endogeneous choices e g the quality of the children and treats the number of children as a discrete variable this added realism is important for the analysis

intergenerational trade longevity and economic growth we develop an overlapping generations model of endogenous growth in which human capital is the engine of growth and the generations are linked through material and emotional interdependencies within the family parents invest in their children to achieve both old age support care and emotional gratification and material support from children is determined through self enforcing implicit contracts we show that optimal intergenerational trade can then lead to maximization of growth opportunities our model produces a theory of the demographic transition linking longevity fertility and economic growth we also show that while population aging may raise the growth rate an increase in young age longevity is likely to produce a greater increase in the growth rate and a reduction in the fertility rate in a growth equilibrium these predictions and the model s implications concerning the behavior of private savings during the takeoff period appear consistent with empirical evidence

income tax compliance in a principal agent framework previous analyses have modeled income tax evasion as a portfolio problem deriving the optimal consumption of the risky asset unreported income under the assumption of a fixed probability of detection the purpose of this paper is to examine some of these issues in tax compliance starting from a different set of assumptions in particular we compare alternative audit policies to the standard random audit policy we focus on an audit cutoff policy in which an agent triggers an audit if his or her reported income is too low and is not audited if reported income is sufficiently high this paper establishes two major results first random audit rules are weakly dominated by audit cutoff rules it can be shown given lump sum taxes and fines that these audit cutoff rules are the least cost policies which induce truthful reporting of income second the dominance of audit cutoff rules over random audit rules holds for lump sum as well as proportional taxation in fact the equilibrium consequences of the two are equivalent

business culture and tax evasion why corruption and the unofficial economy can persist abstract this paper shows that business and tax inspection culture can create multiple equilibria in bad equilibria high cheating and corruption increases in penalties or auditing can have perverse impacts and increase cheating the source of the multiple equilibria is the externalities created by business and tax inspection cultures as tax evasion and corruption become more common they become more acceptable and their cost is lowered a third externality that between firms and inspectors is the source of the perverse effect more cheating by firms is good for bribe taking inspectors and more bribe taking inspectors are good for cheating firms

can internal migration foster the convergence in regional fertility rates evidence from 19th century france this paper offers an explanation for the convergence of fertility rates across french departements in the second half of the nineteenth century that emphasises the diffusion of information through internal migration it tests how migration affected fertility by building a decennial bilateral migration matrix between french departements for 1861 1911 the identification strategy uses exogenous variation in transportation costs resulting from the construction of railways the results suggest that the convergence towards low birth rates can be explained by the diffusion of cultural and economic information pertaining to low fertility behaviour by migrants especially by migrants to and from paris

walking inside the potential tax evader s mind tax morale does matter we conduct an empirical study on the determinants of the psychological costs of tax evasion also known as tax morale as a preliminary step we build a model of tax evasion including non monetary considerations show the relationship between tax compliance and tax morale in the empirical analysis of tax morale we find using a binomial logit model that the justification of tax evasion can be explained by the presence of grievance in absolute terms those who feel that taxes are too high those who feel that public funds are wasted and those who accept underground economic activities and grievances in relative terms the suspected level of others tax evasion the sense of duty and the level of solidarity are also relevant factors but to a lesser extent

audit selection and income tax underreporting in the tax compliance game abstract this paper uses a game theoretic model of the tax compliance game to estimate a model of audit selection and income tax underreporting in jamaica the empirical analysis make use of audited tax returns for individual taxpayers and a random sample of tax returns for the population from which the audited returns are selected the estimation results strongly indicate a nonrandom audit strategy and thus provide support for the game theoretic approach the results also indicate that the probability of underreporting and the level of underreporting are positively related to the marginal tax rate and to income and negatively related to marginal payroll tax benefits in general the underreporting elasticities are small

deterrence vs gamesmanship taxpayer response to targeted audits and endogenous penalties abstract taxpayers with large amounts of non third party reported income usually self report at least a portion of it an act inconsistent with common theories of compliance i explain this behavior by generalizing the classical evasion theory to realistically account for the endogeneity of audit and payment rates these taxpayers refrain from more evasion not due to deterrence but to tilt the odds and payoffs of the evasion gamble the introduction of this incentive helps explain many empirical findings that seemingly contradict a more restrictive and unrealistic version of the deterrence paradigm i also estimate feasible structural calibrations the first based on observed compliance behavior of taxpayers perceptions of the relationship between evasion audit probabilities and payment rates

does credit card information reporting improve small business tax compliance we investigate the response of small businesses operating as sole proprietorships to form 1099 k an information report introduced in 2011 which provides the internal revenue service with information about electronic sales e g credit card sales the overall impact of the policy appears to be relatively small however theory and distributional analysis isolates a subset of taxpayers expected to be especially sensitive to reporting who report receipts equal to or slightly exceeding the receipts reported on 1099 k among this set of taxpayers information reporting induced more complete tax reporting 30 of sensitive taxpayers filed a return declaring business income for the first time and among those that were already filing we estimate an increase in reported receipts by up to 24 these taxpayers largely offset increased reported receipts with increased reported expenses which do not face information reporting diminishing the impact on reported net taxable income

honesty in a regulatory context good thing or bad abstract it is often taken for granted that if more firms were innately honest or ethical this would be a good thing we use the example of pollution policy to dispute such a claim if regulation is by pollution tax social welfare is non monotonic in population honesty the choice of policy instrument may itself be characterised by reversals with command and control methods being preferred for intermediate values of population honesty a tax system being preferred at the extremes this means that if because of the spread of ethical shareholding or for whatever reason the honesty of the corporate population increases through time we should not be surprised to see at first a switch away from market based instruments and then a switch back though environmental regulation is chosen as a context the implications are more general

children and their parents labor supply evidence from exogenous variation in family size although theoretical models of labor supply and the family are well developed there are few credible estimates of key empirical relationships in the work family nexus this study uses a new instrumental variable the sex composition of the first two births in families with at least two children to estimate the effect of additional children on parents labor supply in the united states instrumental variables estimates using the sex mix are substantial but smaller than the corresponding ordinary least squares ols estimates moreover unlike the ols estimates the female labor supply effects estimated using sex mix instruments appear to be absent among more educated women and women with high wage husbands we also find that married women who have a third child reduce their labor supply by as much as women in the full sample while there is no relationship between wives child bearing and husbands labor supply excerpt

the more the merrier the effect of family size and birth order on children s education there is an extensive theoretical literature that postulates a tradeoff between child quantity and quality within a family however there is little causal evidence that speaks to this theory using a rich dataset on the entire population of norway over an extended period of time we examine the effects of family size and birth order on the educational attainment of children while we find a negative correlation between family size and children s education when we include indicators for birth order and or use twin births as an instrument family size effects become negligible in addition birth order has a significant and large negative effect on children s education we also study adult earnings employment and teenage childbearing and find strong evidence for birth order effects with these outcomes particularly among women these findings suggest the need to revisit economic models of fertility and child production focusing not only on differences across families but differences within families as well

population technology and growth from malthusian stagnation to the demographic transition and beyond this paper develops a unied growth model that captures the historical evolution of population technology and output it encompasses theendogenous transitionbetween three regimes that have characterized economic development the economy evolves from amalthusianregime wheretechnologicalprogressis slow andpopulationgrowthprevents anysustainedriseinincomepercapita intoapost malthusianregime wheretechnological progress rises and population growth absorbs only part of output growth ultimately a demographic transition reverses the positive relationship between income and population growth andtheeconomyentersamoderngrowthregimewithreducedpopulationgrowth

changing world prices women s wages and the fertility transition sweden 1860 1910 this time series analysis examines during 1860 1910 the impact of changes in local prices of agricultural commodities on wages among men and women in sweden and the impact of changes in wages on fertility decline child mortality urbanization and improved social conditions linear ordinary least squares models are set up to determine whether demand induced increases in womens wages relative to mens are significant factors in explaining swedish total fertility rates data are obtained from 25 counties and the city of stockholm among pooled observations for six time periods during 1860 64 and 1910 14 this period is marked by a total fertility decline of 28 a marital fertility decline of 26 and a child mortality decline of 52 explanatory variables are the relative prices of main agricultural outputs employment outside of agriculture the proportion of urban population and the child mortality rate findings indicate a significant relationship between child mortality and total fertility and specific fertility rates among women aged 20 39 years a doubling of the male real wage rate was significantly associated with earlier marriage higher birth rates among women aged 15 29 years and lower birth rates among women aged 35 49 years the ratio of male wages to female wages was associated with a decline in birth rates at all ages with the exception of teenagers 66 of fertility increase was due to declines in child mortality but this increase was counterbalanced by fertility decline among older women child mortality and urbanization depressed marital fertility male wages increased the proportion married a 10 increase in the male female wage rate was associated with a 25 reduction in the total fertility rate another 25 increase in the male female wage rate was associated with a 50 reduction in child mortality it is concluded that the value of womens time had a key impact on the swedish fertility transition

the impacts of family size on investment in child quality using multiple births as an exogenous shift in family size i investigate the impact of the number of children on child investment and child well being using data from the 1980 us census five percent public use micro sample 2sls results demonstrate that parents facing a change in family size reallocate resources in a way consistent with becker s quantity quality model a larger family generated by twins in a later birth reduces the likelihood that older children attend private school reduces the mother s labor force participation and increases the likelihood that parents divorce the impact of family size on a measure of child outcome such as grade retention is less clear the results indicate that for both measures of child investment and child well being the 2sls estimates are statistically distinguishable from ols estimates indicating an omitted variables bias in the single equation model

what has driven the great fertility decline in developing countries since 1960 several developing countries are currently experiencing a significant fertility decline however academic economists have paid little attention to this transition this paper seeks to explain the fertility transition by infant mortality urbanisation income culture and educational attainment of females and males using annual data for 92 developing countries over the period 1960 2014 external instruments are used to deal with endogeneity the results suggest that increasing per capita income improved female education and increasing secularisation have been important determinants for declining fertility in the developing world

happiness and tax morale an empirical analysis abstract this paper presents empirical evidence that tax morale taxpayers intrinsic motivation to pay taxes constitutes a new determinant of happiness even after controlling for several demographic and socioeconomic factors using data on italian households for 2004 we assess the strength of tax morale by relying on single items as well as composite multi item indices our main result that fiscal honesty generates a higher hedonic payoff than cheating is in line with harbaugh et al 2007 s neuroeconomic finding further it sheds light on the well known puzzle of compliance that is the fact that many individuals pay taxes even when expected penalty and audit probability are extremely low tax compliance is less puzzling once we show that not only it is materially costly but also provides sizeable non pecuniary benefits that make it rewarding in itself

tax morale and tax evasion reports the study proposes a new measure of tax morale for italy based on voluntary tax evasion reports using this measure i detected a positive relationship between tax morale and social capital political participation and immigration but a negative relationship between tax morale and the dissatisfaction with public services and unemployment

fertility transitions along the extensive and intensive margins this paper examines the fertility transition through a new lens the extensive margin parents with high levels of children might substitute quality for quantity as the constraints on quality relax or those on quantity tighten however along the extensive margin the quantity quality trade off cannot operate at low levels of fertility we expect quality and quantity to be essential complements we apply these insights to a large school construction program in the american south during the early 20th century the rosenwald rural schools initiative we find that increased schooling opportunities lead to reductions in fertility among women with high fertility levels while at the same time inducing higher levels of fertility among women with low levels of fertility the magnitude of the fertility changes induced in the parent generation is however small compared to the changes in fertility induced by the rosenwald intervention among women that were themselves treated by the intervention the evidence from the rosenwald intervention therefore suggests that changes in female opportunity costs induced by increased educational attainment might be among the most important driving forces of the fertility transition

social norms moderate the effect of tax system on tax evasion evidence from a large scale survey experiment in this study we reconcile conflicting findings from the extant literature on the impact of tax system parameters on tax noncompliance we argue that social norms play a role of heuristics facilitating tax payers response to the instrumental incentives posed by the systemic parameters such as tax rate and penalties for evasion and thus moderate the effect of those parameters on willingness to evade taxes relying on a unique survey experiment conducted in fourteen countries of central eastern europe we demonstrate two types of a conditioning effect of norms first the impact of tax rates on respondents propensity for tax evasion is moderated by the perceived norms of the society at large descriptive norms in particular an increasing tax rate lowers the probability of evasion as long as one views most others as honest taxpayers which highlights the importance of equitability fairness concerns for tax compliance decisions in contrast the impact of punishment is moderated by the perceived norms of one s immediate reference group subjective norms strong subjective compliance norms tend to effectively replace penalties as a mechanism discouraging tax evasion suggesting that the deterrent effect of a penalty can be entirely suppressed when subjective norms are strong these findings have important implications for the understanding of tax compliance decisions under different formal and informal regimes

the trade off between child quantity and quality an empirical investigation of trade offs between number of children and their scholastic performance confirms that family size directly affects children s achievement though parents show no favori

delegation as commitment the case of income tax audits in this article we study the value of delegating authority over income tax audit policy arising from the incompleteness of contracts consider a utilitarian government whose ability to commit is limited to aggregate dimensions of its audit policy as publicly verifiable information about detailed allocations of audit budgets is not available we show that the welfare level associated with the full commitment solution can be attained by delegating authority over audit policy to a manager the latter is offered a simple incentive scheme based only on the aggregate variables which are publicly observable in contrast if the government retains authority direct commitment to these same variables does not allow the full commitment welfare level to be achieved thus despite sharing a common informational basis delegation may perform better than centralized arrangements in the presence of incomplete contracts

contraception and development a unified growth theory this study investigates the interaction of the use of modern contraceptives fertility education and long run growth it develops an economic model that takes into account that sexual intercourse is utility enhancing and that birth control by modern contraceptives is more efficient but more costly than traditional methods the study shows how a traditional economy in which modern contraceptives are not used gradually converges toward a high growth regime in which modern contraceptives are used lower prices or higher efficacy of contraceptives are conducive to an earlier onset of the fertility transition and a quicker takeoff to modern growth