Verlag:
Arbeitskreis Quantitative Steuerlehre, Berlin
This study investigates the contagious nature of tax avoidance by examining how narratives affect tax avoiding behavior. We adapt the idea of narrative economics indicating that individuals' actions are stimulated by stories that spread within a...
mehr
ZBW - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft, Standort Kiel
Signatur:
DS 103
Fernleihe:
keine Fernleihe
This study investigates the contagious nature of tax avoidance by examining how narratives affect tax avoiding behavior. We adapt the idea of narrative economics indicating that individuals' actions are stimulated by stories that spread within a society. We employ two types of infection models to theoretically investigate how tax avoidance schemes spread over time and vanish eventually consistent with patterns known from epidemiology. We find that general tax avoidance can persist even if its expected outcome is negative, while specific tax avoidance schemes might vanish even though their expected outcome is positive. We find empirical support for the predicted dissemination of narratives related to both general and specific tax avoidance schemes in google n-grams. Finally, we show that dissemination of specific tax avoidance schemes is attenuated by anti-narratives in (social) media. Our findings help to understand how tax avoidance spreads, under what conditions anti-avoidance measures can effectively curb tax avoidance and point towards the crucial role of transparency of enhanced enforcement by visible narratives.
Verlag:
WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, [Vienna]
We propose a model that captures tax avoidance as an investment under uncertainty: searching for tax loopholes or developing legal avoidance schemes is associated with costs; the tax benefit is however uncertain. Its height depends on whether or not...
mehr
ZBW - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft, Standort Kiel
Signatur:
VS 317
Fernleihe:
keine Fernleihe
We propose a model that captures tax avoidance as an investment under uncertainty: searching for tax loopholes or developing legal avoidance schemes is associated with costs; the tax benefit is however uncertain. Its height depends on whether or not the tax agency agrees with the chosen avoidance model. We find that increasing the tax rate causes taxpayers to devote more (less) effort to tax optimization if the variance of tax savings is below (above) a certain threshold. Using an epidemiological SIS-model we account for social contagion effects. We find that there exist parameter constellations in which increasing the tax rate causes both individual avoidance effort and the number of tax avoiders to increase, implying that tax revenue decreases. If tax avoidance is a precondition for tax evasion, the number of tax evaders can increase if more individuals avoid taxes as a consequence of an increase in the tax rate. Thus, increasing the tax rate can cause overall compliance to shrink even if all taxpayers evade by less. This happens if expected tax benefits are rather predictable
WU international taxation research paper series ; no. 2021, 06
Working paper series / SFB/Transregio TRR 266 Accounting for Transparency ; no. 59 (August 2021)