Carlo V. Fiorio

The Effect of Tax Enforcement on Tax Morale

In this paper we argue that tax enforcement is an additional contextual factor affecting tax morale, one of the most important determinants of tax compliance. By using a unique dataset that merges a representative sample of Italian households with administrative data on tax enforcement, we first find that tax morale is positively correlated with tax enforcement. Second, to deal with possible endogeneity of tax enforcement, we show that results are confirmed in an IV specification using the change in the tax gap at the provincial level as an instrument for tax enforcement. Finally, we provide evidence that the impact of tax enforcement and social environment is stronger at low quantiles of tax morale. Our results show that besides that of lowering the expected value of tax evasion, tax enforcement has an additional and indirect effect on tax compliance through its effect on tax morale.

Inequality Decompositions - A Reconciliation

We show how classic source-decomposition and subgroup-decomposition methods can be reconciled with regression methodology used in the recent literature. We also highlight some pitfalls that arise from uncritical use of the regression approach. The LIS database is used to compare the approaches using an analysis of the changing contributions to inequality in the United States and Finland.

Workers' Tax Evasion in Italy

We apply a direct method to estimate tax evasion in Italy, assuming that tax evaders might consider declaring a closer-to-true income in an anonymous interview. The methodology is applied to employed and self-employed taxpayers, combining the Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) by the Bank of Italy and a large random sample of tax forms by SeCIT (Tax auditing office - Ministry of Finance), both referred to incomes received in 2000. Paying particular attention to the post-stratification of the data, we find that tax evasion is consistently higher for self-employment income than for employment income: the difference ranges from about 7% in lower deciles to 27% around the mode. This analysis shows that a relevant level of tax evasion arises also at low levels of employment income, although some under-sampling and misreporting problems need to be considered. An evaluation of the redistribution and incidence effects of tax evasion among workers is provided.

Do you pay a fair price for electricity? Consumers’ satisfaction and utility reform in the EU

The research question addressed by this paper is a simple one: are European consumers happy with the electricity supply services after two decades of reforms? We focus on self-assessed consumers’ satisfaction with electricity prices as reported in three waves of Eurobarometer survey, 2000-2002-2004, conditioning on some indicators of public ownership, vertical integration and entry regulation across the EU-15. Our results do not support a systematic association between consumers’ satisfaction and the complete reform package made of privatisation, vertical disintegration and liberalisation. These results, which have been extensively tested for robustness, raise various concerns about the way the reform processes have been undertaken and provides some warnings about possible effects on public support for public utility reforms.

Shadow Wages for the EU Regions

The shadow wage is the social opportunity cost of labor. After reviewing earlier theoretical and empirical literature, we define four labor market conditions: fairly socially efficient (FSE), quasi-Keynesian unemployment (QKU), urban labor dualism (ULD) and rural labor dualism (RLD). We offer, for the first time to date, an empirical estimation of the shadow wages for the EU at regional (NUTS2) level. Our estimated values are in the form of conversion factors that translate actual observed real wages into shadow wages, as required by social cost-benefit analysis of investment projects under the Structural Funds of the EU. Our results are obtained with an empirical strategy that is easy to implement with aggregate data, differently from micro-data based approaches that are costly, project specific, and often difficult to be applied because of lack of data. We find that the conversion factor for the shadow wage rate is 0.998 in 29 FSE regions (mostly capital cities); 0.943 in 135 ULD regions (mostly in rich areas); 0.8005 in 74 QKU regions, and just 0.519 in 32 RLD regions. These findings point to high variability of labor markets in the EU and have important applications for project evaluation.

What Happens to the Careers of European Workers When Immigrants "Take Their Jobs"?

Following a representative longitudinal sample of native European residents over the period 1995–2001, we identify the effect of the inflows of immigrants on natives’ career, employment, and wages. We control for individual, country-year, occupation group-year, and occupation group-country heterogeneity and shocks, and construct an imputed inflow of the foreign-born population that is exogenous to local demand shocks. We find that native European workers are more likely to move to occupations associated with higher skills and status when a larger number of immigrants enters their labor market. We find no evidence of an increase in their probability of becoming unemployed.

Taxpayer Behavior When Audit Rules Are Known: Evidence from Italy

Italy adopted in 1998 a peculiar audit scheme (Studi di Settore), for small and medium enterprises and the self-employed. This scheme is based on a particular interaction between the tax agency and taxpayers, where the agency unveils only part of the information used to develop its audit rule. The authors study this scheme by means of a simple theoretical model and they test it using a sample of 23,000 firms in manufacturing sectors in the 2005 tax year. A number of theoretically relevant relations are confirmed. In particular, reports made by taxpayers seem to be positively associated to the firm’s size. When taxpayers know that the probability to be audited decreases, they tend to report less. Other factors that are expected to influence the behavior of taxpayers have no or an ambiguous impact on reporting behavior.

Public Enterprises in the Market for Corporate Control: Recent Worldwide Evidence

This paper analyzes deals involving private and public enterprises, i.e. State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) worldwide since 2004. We consider four types of deals: privatizations of SOEs, public enterprises acquiring private ones (public-private deals), private reorganizations (i.e private firms acquiring a private target) and public reorganizations. (i.e. both acquirer and target are SOEs). We study whether the pre-deal performance and corporate characteristics of the acquirer and target companies vary across the four types of deals depending on ownership: public or private. Data are taken from Zephyr (Bureau Van Dijk), which provides information on completed deals worldwide and Orbis, a firm-level dataset (also implemented by BvD). Some results of previous literature on M&As performed by private firms (˜the inefficiency management hypothesis) are both confirmed and expanded. Acquirers involved in deals are both larger and better performing than their targets but some qualifications are in order with respect to ownership. The difference in size and performance between acquirers and targets is in fact more pronounced for public with respect to private acquirers. The evidence thus points to an active role of SOEs as acquirers, as they significantly out-perform relative to their targets, including private ones, in terms of return on sales. Given these novel findings, further research is needed to examine the motivations behind the different types of deals considered and to verify the role of government ownership in the contemporary global economy.

Individual Vs Family Taxation: An Analysis Using Tabeita04

In this paper we analyze whether Italian families, and especially those with children, would benefit from a tax system defined on a family rather than an individual tax unit. This analysis is performed using TABEITA04, the tax-benefit microsimulation model developed at Econpubblica on a representative sample of 2004 Italian households.Results show that family with kids would, on average, lose from such a reform as they are better off with the actual individual tax system, which provides generous tax credits for family burdens. The simulated reform could also be extremely costly in terms of labor force participation of spouses: in our sample, over 80% of spouses are not working and nearly 40% of them would face an increased marginal tax rate if the family tax unit was introduced. Those benefiting the most would be couples without children where both spouses are working, who are not enjoying any tax credit in the current tax system.

Understanding Italian Inequality Trends

This article develops a unifying framework for analysing the effects of: (i) the changing distribution of individual incomes by main factor sources, (ii) the increasing participation of wives in the labour force, and (iii) the changing distribution of family types on the distinctive trends towards inequality in equivalent household income in Italy between 1977 and 2004. Changes in the distribution of work and pension incomes explain most of the trend. The higher average likelihood of wage-earning wives had an unequalizing effect on households on the left tail of the income distribution. Little is explained by the changing distribution of family types.