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Full-Text Articles in Taxation

Tackling Undeclared Work In The Agricultural Sector, With A Focus Upon Seasonal Workers And Horticulture: Background Paper For The European Platform On Tackling Undeclared Work Seminar, Colin C. Williams Jan 2019

Tackling Undeclared Work In The Agricultural Sector, With A Focus Upon Seasonal Workers And Horticulture: Background Paper For The European Platform On Tackling Undeclared Work Seminar, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

This background paper briefly sets out the prevalence of undeclared work in the agricultural sector in the European Union and the approaches and tools available for tackling such work, with a focus upon horticulture and undeclared seasonal workers. The intention is to stimulate the thoughts of participants attending the European Platform Tackling Undeclared Work seminar on “Tackling undeclared work in the agricultural sector: with a focus upon seasonal workers and horticulture” (to be held in Brussels on January 24th 2019) on potential policy which could be adopted to transform undeclared work into declared work in the agricultural sector, especially with …

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Glossary Of Terms: European Platform Tackling Undeclared Work, Colin C. Williams Nov 2018

Glossary Of Terms: European Platform Tackling Undeclared Work, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

This glossary is intended to provide a common understanding of the terminology that is used in the European Platform tackling undeclared work web pages, documents and publications. It does not provide official Platform definitions of the terms listed therein. Where possible, references are provided to the source of the understandings provided.
To facilitate understanding, the terms in the glossary are grouped together rather than presented as an A-Z list.

In the first section, the common understandings about undeclared work and its various sub-types are provided, followed by other related concepts and terms often used for activities related to undeclared work. …

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Explaining And Tackling Under-Declared Employment In Fyr Macedonia: The Employers Perspective, Colin C. Williams, Slavko Bezeredi Oct 2018

Explaining And Tackling Under-Declared Employment In Fyr Macedonia: The Employers Perspective, Colin C. Williams, Slavko Bezeredi

Colin C Williams

The aim of this paper is to evaluate how employers who illegally under-report their employees’ salaries to
evade paying the full tax and social contributions owed can be explained and tackled. These employers have
been conventionally explained as rational economic actors doing so when the benefits outweigh the costs,
and thus the solution is to increase the sanctions and/or probability of detection. An alternative social actor
approach, however, explains employers as under-reporting salaries because of their lack of both vertical trust
(i.e., their beliefs are not in symmetry with the laws and regulations) and horizontal trust (i.e., they believe
many …

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Tackling Under-Declared Employment In The European Union: Input Paper To Thematic Discussion Of European Platform Tackling Undeclared Work, Colin C. Williams Oct 2018

Tackling Under-Declared Employment In The European Union: Input Paper To Thematic Discussion Of European Platform Tackling Undeclared Work, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

The under-declaration of work ranges from employers using unregistered employees, through the under-declaration of income by the formal self-employed and formal businesses, to the misuse of collaborative platforms and the digital economy to conceal the full amount of incomes and social security due.
The objective of this thematic discussion on under-declared employment in the European Union is: (i) to exchange information on what works and what does not, (ii) to generate knowledge about under-declared employment, and (iii) to explore how the Platform activities can contribute to tackling under-declared employment.
The intention is to focus upon two types of under-declaring work: …

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Evaluating Policy Approaches Towards Undeclared Work: Some Lessons From Fyr Of Macedonia, Colin C. Williams Oct 2018

Evaluating Policy Approaches Towards Undeclared Work: Some Lessons From Fyr Of Macedonia, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

To tackle undeclared work, the conventional rational economic actor approach
uses deterrents to ensure that the costs of engaging in undeclared work outweigh
the benefits. Recent years have seen the emergence of a social actor approach
which focuses upon improving tax morale. To analyse the association between
participation in undeclared work and these policy approaches, 2,014 face-toface
interviews, conducted in FYROM in 2015, are reported. Logistic regression
analysis reveals no association between participation in undeclared work and the
perceived level of penalties and risk of detection, but there is an association with
the level of tax morale. The paper concludes …

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Evaluating Competing Perspectives Towards Undeclared Work: Some Lessons From Bulgaria, Colin C. Williams Aug 2018

Evaluating Competing Perspectives Towards Undeclared Work: Some Lessons From Bulgaria, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

When explaining and tackling the undeclared economy in Central
and Eastern Europe, participants have been conventionally viewed
as rational economic actors. They engage in undeclared work
when the benefits outweigh the costs. Participation is thus
deterred by increasing the sanctions and/or probability of being
caught. Recently, however, an alternative social actor approach
has emerged which views participants as engaging in undeclared
work when their norms, values and beliefs (i.e. citizen morale) do
not align with laws and regulations (i.e. state morale). Here, therefore,
initiatives to develop greater symmetry between civic and
state morale are pursued. To evaluate the validity and …

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Do Deterrents Prevent Undeclared Work? An Evaluation Of The Rational Economic Actor Approach, Ioana Horodnic, Colin C. Williams Jan 2018

Do Deterrents Prevent Undeclared Work? An Evaluation Of The Rational Economic Actor Approach, Ioana Horodnic, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

Across the member states of the European Union and beyond, paid transactions occur that are not declared to the state for tax, social security and/or labour law purposes when they should be declared. This is not a minority practice. The undeclared economy is estimated to be equivalent to 17.9 per cent of the EU28 GDP in 2016. Similarly, it is estimated that 9.3 per cent of total labour input in the private sector in the EU28 is undeclared and that undeclared work constitutes on average 14.3 per cent of gross value added in the private sector. Furthermore, in 2013, 4 …

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Investor Valuations Of Japan's Adoption Of A Territorial Tax Regime: Quantifying The Direct And Competitive Effects Of International Tax Reform, Sebastien J. Bradley, Estelle Dauchy, Makoto Hasegawa Dec 2017

Investor Valuations Of Japan's Adoption Of A Territorial Tax Regime: Quantifying The Direct And Competitive Effects Of International Tax Reform, Sebastien J. Bradley, Estelle Dauchy, Makoto Hasegawa

Sebastien J Bradley

Despite an extensive literature on the normative implications of different international tax regimes and an empirical literature addressing individual specific predictions, there exists little evidence encompassing the broad range of effects of taxing corporations' foreign-source income on a worldwide or territorial basis. This paper takes a more comprehensive quantitative approach by examining stock market reactions surrounding four events over the course of which Japan's 2009 adoption of a dividend exemption system was developed into proposed law. Using an event study methodology which leverages individual firm characteristics and accounts for contemporaneous financial market developments, we find that Japanese firms with less …

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Tackling Undeclared Work In Croatia: Knowledge-Informed Policy Responses, Colin C. Williams, Peter Rodgers, Ruslan Stefanov Aug 2017

Tackling Undeclared Work In Croatia: Knowledge-Informed Policy Responses, Colin C. Williams, Peter Rodgers, Ruslan Stefanov

Colin C Williams

KEY POINTS
Ø  Undeclared work has deep roots in Croatia. One in eleven declare to have done some fully undeclared work. Six out of ten though believe at least 20% of their compatriots violate tax and labour laws.
Ø  The perception of the widespread nature of undeclared work and the lack of trust in formal institutions seem to be the main incentives for people to engage in undeclared work. These have been exacerbated by high unemployment and low retirement income.
Ø  Hence, the conventional rational actor approach to tackling undeclared work that focuses upon increasing penalties …

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Preventative Policy Measures To Tackle Undeclared Work In Croatia, Colin C. Williams Jul 2017

Preventative Policy Measures To Tackle Undeclared Work In Croatia, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

This report examines the drivers of the undeclared economy in Croatia, the current organisation of the fight against undeclared work, and reviews the current and potential policy approaches and measures for tackling undeclared work in Croatia.
 
Drivers of the undeclared economy in Croatia
Recently, significant advances have been made in explaining the determinants of undeclared work. To explain undeclared work, it has been understood that every society has institutions which prescribe, monitor and enforce the ‘rules of the game’ regarding what is socially acceptable. In all societies, these institutions are of two types: formal institutions that prescribe ‘state morality’ …

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Tackling The Urban Informal Economy: Some Lessons From A Study Of Europe’S Urban Population, Colin C. Williams, Ioana Horodnic Jun 2017

Tackling The Urban Informal Economy: Some Lessons From A Study Of Europe’S Urban Population, Colin C. Williams, Ioana Horodnic

Colin C Williams

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the
most effective way of tackling the urban informal
economy. It has been recently argued that the
conventional rational economic actor approach
(which increases the costs of participating in the
urban informal economy so that they outweigh
the benefi ts) should be replaced or complemented
by a social actor approach which focuses
upon improving tax morale. To evaluate the effectiveness
of these supposedly alternative approaches
to tackling the participation of urban
populations in the informal economy, we report
the results of face-to-face interviews conducted
in 2013 with 17,886 urban dwellers across the …

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Tackling The Participation Of Europe’S Rural Population In The Shadow Economy, Colin C. Williams, Ioana Horodnic May 2017

Tackling The Participation Of Europe’S Rural Population In The Shadow Economy, Colin C. Williams, Ioana Horodnic

Colin C Williams

To tackle the shadow economy, an emergent literature has called for the conventional
rational economic actor approach (which uses deterrents to ensure that the costs of engaging in shadow
work outweigh the benefits) to be replaced or complemented by a social actor approach which focuses
upon improving tax morale. To evaluate the relevance and validity of doing this in rural areas, we here report
face-to-face interviews conducted with 9,677 rural dwellers conducted across the 28 member states of the
European Union (EU28) in 2013. Multilevel logistic regression analysis reveals that both approaches significantly
reduce the rural shadow economy. When tax …

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Developing A Holistic Approach For Tackling Undeclared Work: Background Paper, Colin C. Williams Nov 2016

Developing A Holistic Approach For Tackling Undeclared Work: Background Paper, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

What is a holistic approach to tackling undeclared work? A holistic policy approach towards tackling the undeclared economy uses in a strategic and coordinated manner the full range of both the direct and indirect policy approaches and measures available to increase the power of, and trust in, authorities respectively.
 
Direct approachesreduce the costs and increase the benefits of operating on a declared basis, and increase the costs and reduce the benefits of operating undeclared. To do this, it uses:
·      Deterrence measures that detect and punish participation in undeclared work firstly, by increasing the perceived or actual …

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"Use" Valuation Under The 1976 Tax Reform Act: Problems And Implications, Michael D. Boehlje, Neil E. Harl Jul 2016

"Use" Valuation Under The 1976 Tax Reform Act: Problems And Implications, Michael D. Boehlje, Neil E. Harl

Neil E. Harl

With the rapid rise in farmland*values during recent years, farmers and farm organizations have argued that land values have little relationship to agricultural productivity. The fact that farmers have been the dominant purchasers in the farm real estate market during this period of time would seem to discredit this argument to some degree, but public officials have been sympathetic to the farmers' arguments. Some state legislatures, particularly in areas o f the country where urban expansion has placed upward pressures on land values, have adopted procedures to value farmland based on its agricultural productivity for purposes of assessing property tax.

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Round-Tripping Of Domestic Profits Under The American Jobs Creation Act Of 2004, Sebastien J. Bradley Jan 2016

Round-Tripping Of Domestic Profits Under The American Jobs Creation Act Of 2004, Sebastien J. Bradley

Sebastien J Bradley

The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 provided a substantial tax benefit to U.S. multinational corporations in the form of a temporary 85 percent deduction for repatriated dividends. An unforeseen consequence of this tax holiday may have also been to induce firms to reallocate earnings toward low-tax foreign subsidiaries for immediate repatriation and thereby escape higher rates of corporate income taxation. I estimate this unconventional form of round-tripping to have increased reported earnings among repatriating affiliates by $17 billion, suggesting moderate aggregate effects of a large temporary reduction in the repatriation tax on short-run income reallocation activity. Results involving measures …

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Cross-Country Evidence On The Preliminary Effects Of Patent Box Regimes On Patent Activity And Ownership, Sebastien J. Bradley, Estelle Dauchy, Leslie Robinson Nov 2015

Cross-Country Evidence On The Preliminary Effects Of Patent Box Regimes On Patent Activity And Ownership, Sebastien J. Bradley, Estelle Dauchy, Leslie Robinson

Sebastien J Bradley

This paper evaluates the initial impacts of patent box regimes in light of their primary stated objectives: stimulating domestic innovation and retaining mobile patent income to limit base erosion. Despite their lack of nexus requirements, we find that patent box regimes yield a 3 percent increase in new patent applications for every percentage point reduction in the tax rate on patent income. We find no significant impact of these regimes on deterring outward cross-border attribution of patent ownership, or on attracting ownership of foreign inventions. Increased patenting activity hence appears focused on inventions involving co-located (domestic) patent owners and inventors.

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Attitude–Behavior Consistency In Tax Compliance: A Cross-National Comparison, Alice Guerra, Brooke Harrington Nov 2015

Attitude–Behavior Consistency In Tax Compliance: A Cross-National Comparison, Alice Guerra, Brooke Harrington

Brooke Harrington

Are individuals’ attitudes about paying taxes consistent with their behavior? A direct link between attitudes (tax morale) and behavior (tax compliance) has long been assumed, despite an extensive social scientific literature attesting to the generally weak congruence between the two. This study builds on an emerging body of work questioning the link between tax morale and compliance. It innovates with a cross-national experimental research design whose results indicate that populations with high levels of tax morale exhibit higher evasion rates than those with low levels of tax morale; thus, the study finds that individual self-reported tax morale cannot predict actual …

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Designing Survey Methods To Evaluate The Undeclared Economy: A Review Of The Options, Colin C. Williams Jun 2015

Designing Survey Methods To Evaluate The Undeclared Economy: A Review Of The Options, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

This Working Paper is part of the GREY project which is developing capacities and capabilities in tackling undeclared work. In this Working Paper, the various options available to researchers when designing surveys to tackle undeclared work are evaluated. These issues include the unit of analysis used, the data collection methodology, an array of questionnaire design issues (including the reference period, whether to define the phenomenon for participants, a direct versus gradual approach to sensitive issues, whether to do a supply- and/or demand-side survey; whether to examine the relationship between purchasers and sellers, how to discourage social desirability bias), sample size, …

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The Sfa Business Review Vol. 3 No. 2, M. Dudley Stewart, Janelle C. Ashley, John D. Whitt, Marlin C. Young, Ralph White Mar 2015

The Sfa Business Review Vol. 3 No. 2, M. Dudley Stewart, Janelle C. Ashley, John D. Whitt, Marlin C. Young, Ralph White

Ralph E. White

No abstract provided.

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Designing Focus Groups And Experiments To Evaluate Policy Approaches And Measures For Tackling Undeclared Work, Marina Polak, Lyubomir Mishkov, Colin C. Williams Jan 2015

Designing Focus Groups And Experiments To Evaluate Policy Approaches And Measures For Tackling Undeclared Work, Marina Polak, Lyubomir Mishkov, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

The aim of this Working Paper is to review the literature on conducting focus groups and experiments in the field of tax non-compliance and undeclared work, and then to set set a range of possible uses of focus groups and experiments to evaluate the feasibility of various policy measures in the context of Bulgaria, Croatia and Macedonia.

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Employment Effects Of The Washington High Technology Business And Occupation Tax Credit, Timothy J. Bartik, Kevin Hollenbeck Jan 2015

Employment Effects Of The Washington High Technology Business And Occupation Tax Credit, Timothy J. Bartik, Kevin Hollenbeck

Timothy J. Bartik

No abstract provided.

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The Impact Of Marginal Business Taxes On State Manufacturing, Richard Funderburg, Timothy Bartik, Alan Peters, Peter Fisher Jan 2015

The Impact Of Marginal Business Taxes On State Manufacturing, Richard Funderburg, Timothy Bartik, Alan Peters, Peter Fisher

Timothy J. Bartik

No abstract provided.

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The Effects Of State And Local Taxes On Economic Development: A Review Of Recent Research, Timothy Bartik Jan 2015

The Effects Of State And Local Taxes On Economic Development: A Review Of Recent Research, Timothy Bartik

Timothy J. Bartik

No abstract provided.

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Employment Effects Of The Washington High Technology Business And Occupation Tax Credit, Timothy J. Bartik, Kevin Hollenbeck Jan 2015

Employment Effects Of The Washington High Technology Business And Occupation Tax Credit, Timothy J. Bartik, Kevin Hollenbeck

Kevin Hollenbeck

No abstract provided.

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Policy Approaches Towards Undeclared Work: A Conceptual Framework, Colin C. Williams May 2014

Policy Approaches Towards Undeclared Work: A Conceptual Framework, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

The aim of this working paper is to provide a conceptual framework for understanding the policy approaches for tackling undeclared work. In doing so, the intention is to provide the structure for a future comprehensive review of the policy measures available for tackling undeclared work.

This paper is part of a series of papers associated with the project entitled ‘Out of the shadows: developing capacities and capabilities for tackling undeclared work in Bulgaria, Croatia and FYR Macedonia’. Funded by the European Commission’s Framework 7 Industry-Academia Partnerships Programme (IAPP), the objective of this project is to provide concrete policy recommendations about …

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L’Emploi Informel Dans Les Économies Développées Et En Développement: Quelles Perspectives, Quelles Interventions?, Colin C. Williams Nov 2013

L’Emploi Informel Dans Les Économies Développées Et En Développement: Quelles Perspectives, Quelles Interventions?, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

L’objet de cet article introductif est de proposer un panorama des définitions
et modes de quantification de l’activité informelle, de présenter quelques
résultats sur son étendue et ses caractéristiques, ainsi que d’exposer les thèses en
présence sur son rôle dans les économies contemporaines et la façon de l’aborder.
Cela donne une série de cadres conceptuels permettant de mieux appréhender la
littérature foisonnante sur l’emploi informel, et aussi de mieux comprendre l’apport
de chacune des contributions de ce numéro spécial au progrès des connaissances
sur ce phénomène.

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Investor Responses To Dividends Received Deductions: Rewarding Multinational Tax Avoidance?, Sebastien J. Bradley Oct 2013

Investor Responses To Dividends Received Deductions: Rewarding Multinational Tax Avoidance?, Sebastien J. Bradley

Sebastien J Bradley

Central to the debate over U.S. international tax reform is understanding how multinational tax avoidance behavior might respond to a reduction in taxes on repatriated foreign-source earnings. Beginning in early 2009, several attempts have been made to re-institute a temporary 85 percent dividends received deduction that would have reduced such taxes for U.S. multinational corporations. Despite an intense lobbying effort, the measure was ultimately cast aside in late 2011, temporarily yielding to the criticism, in part, that the original such provision enacted under the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 offered a generous reward for international tax avoidance. Exploiting the …

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Tackling Undeclared Work In Croatia, Colin C. Williams, Marijana Baric, Piet Renooy May 2013

Tackling Undeclared Work In Croatia, Colin C. Williams, Marijana Baric, Piet Renooy

Colin C Williams

No abstract provided.

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The Shadow Economy, Colin C. Williams, Friedrich Schneider May 2013

The Shadow Economy, Colin C. Williams, Friedrich Schneider

Colin C Williams

No abstract provided.

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Tackling Undeclared Work In Montenegro, Colin C. Williams, Marijana Baric, Piet Renooy May 2013

Tackling Undeclared Work In Montenegro, Colin C. Williams, Marijana Baric, Piet Renooy

Colin C Williams

No abstract provided.

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