Who pays taxes? Liturgies and the Antidosis procedure in Ancient Athens

Bryan McCannon

Constitutional Political Economy, 2017, vol. 28, issue 4, No 5, 407-421

Abstract: Abstract Ancient Athens developed a constitutional democracy. A core, time invariant political economy problem is that of providing public services when wealth is imperfectly know. I model theoretically a unique institution developed in Ancient Athens known as the Antidosis. It allowed a citizen on the list of tax-payers to challenge a citizen not contributing to replace him and make the public goods contribution. The challenged citizen, rather than allow the claim to go before a jury trial, could choose to swap wealth with the accusing tax payer. I argue this acts as a screening mechanism and improves upon the asymmetric information problem the government has in identifying who is indeed those who have the highest wealth to provide the tax revenue to finance the public services.

Keywords: Antidosis; Classical Athens; Liturgy; Public finance; Public goods; Taxation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H26 K40 N44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10602-017-9249-7

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