Tax Morale, Tax Compliance and the Optimal Tax Policy

Gaetano Lisi

No 313, Discussion Papers in Economic Behaviour from University of Valencia, ERI-CES

Abstract: Following the behavioural branch of tax compliance literature, this paper tries to incorporate tax morale into the optimal taxation theory. We show that tax morale affects the optimal mix of policy tools of deterrence to clamp down tax evasion. The optimal tax policy in fact differs according to the type of tax payer taken into account. Precisely, in the case of honest taxpayers the optimal strategy from a social welfare standpoint is to substitute a higher taxation/penalty with tighter monitoring; whereas, in the case of tax evaders, the policy maker should enforce both a higher penalty and an increased monitoring

Keywords: tax evasion; tax compliance; tax morale; taxation; monitoring JEL (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H26 J64 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-iue, nep-pbe and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.uv.es/erices/RePEc/WP/2013/0313.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Tax morale, tax compliance and the optimal tax policy (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dbe:wpaper:0313

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers in Economic Behaviour from University of Valencia, ERI-CES Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emilio Calvo Ramón ().