The Response of Taxpayer Compliance to the Large Shock of Italian Unification
Marisa Ratto
Additional contact information
Marisa Ratto: LEDa - Laboratoire d'Economie de Dauphine - IRD - Institut de Recherche pour le Développement - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Post-Print from HAL
Abstract:
Because of differences in the levels of taxation among pre-unitary states, Italian unification in 1861 determined differential increments in the tax burden among areas of the country. We constructed an index of these tax shocks and collected province-level data on historical and current indicators of tax evasion to evaluate the impact of the unification on tax compliance. We show that the historical variability in tax evasion reduced a lot in the following decades and that the convergence process preserved quite well the ranking in compliance among provinces. We also find that the shock to the tax burden explains much of the historical and current variability in tax evasion. The role of local congestion externalities, arising within a decentralized system of tax enforcement as that set in Italy, is formally explored to account for such evidence.
Keywords: State formation; Tax shock; Noncompliance; Decentralized enforcement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Published in European Journal of Political Economy, 2021, 70
There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.
Related works:
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:hal:journl:hal-03538497
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().