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In Switzerland, two key church institutions - the Conference of Swiss Bishops (CSB) and the Federation of Protestant Churches (FPC) - make public recommendations on how to vote for certain referenda. We leverage this unique situation to directly measure religious organizations' power to shape human decision making. We employ an objective measure of voters' commitment to their religious organization to determine whether they are more likely to vote in line with this organization's recommendations. We find that voting recommendations do indeed matter, implying that even in a secularized world, religion plays a crucial role in voting decisions.

This paper analyses how tax morale and countries' institutional quality affect the shadow economy, controlling in a multivariate analysis for a variety of potential factors. The literature strongly emphasizes the quantitative importance of these factors to understand the size and development of the shadow economy. Relatively new data sources that have become available offer an exceptional opportunity to shed more light on a topic that is attracting increasing attention. We find strong support for the assertion that a higher tax morale and a higher institutional quality lead to a smaller shadow economy.

This paper analyses how governance or institutional quality and tax morale affect the shadow economy, using an international country panel and also within country data. The literature strongly emphasizes the quantitative importance of these factors to understand the level and changes of shadow economy. However, the limited number of investigations use cross-sectional country data with a relatively small number of observations, and hardly any paper has investigated tax morale and provides evidence using within country data. Using more than 25 proxies that measure governance and institutional quality we find strong support that its increase leads to a smaller shadow economy. Moreover, an increase in tax morale reduces the size of the shadow economy.

The field of behavioral taxation dates back at least to the 1950s. In this contribution I will explore the opportunities and challenges in the area, with a particular focus on tax compliance. I will focus on the data required to make further progress, discussing what can be improved when working with surveys and how the field could benefit from open government data initiatives. I focus on collaborative efforts among scientists as well as with the government or the tax administration and examine many potential areas of exploration. The opportunities currently emerging due to digitalization provide not only interesting avenues for collaborations but also a natural method of using tools such as lab and field experiments. In addition, I will discuss potential dangers faced by the field of behavioral economics that also threaten the field of behavioral taxation.

This paper begins with a discussion on James Buchanan's suggestion to replace the word "economics" with "symbiotics", viewing human behavior through the window of exchange rather than choice. Although our current textbooks - such as those by Daron Acemoglu, David Laibson, and John A. List (Microeconomics and Macroeconomics) - tend to over-emphasize choice rather than exchange, a look at documents published in Scopus during the past 70 years indicates that exchange is equally well represented throughout those years. More fundamentally, words such as choice or exchange are kind of "suitcase-like" words that conceal the complexity of very different things and concepts whose relationship we often do not sufficiently discuss or comprehend. As Richard Feynman, Marvin Minsky, and Aaron Sloman remind us, there is a difference between the name of a thing and what actually goes on. To make this point, the paper looks at the mechanism and machinery of decision-making to highlight that mechanisms can be programmed; in the process, reviving old AI ideas such as the General Problem Solver developed by Allen Newell, Clifford Shaw, and Herbert Simon, or Marvin Minsky's "Prediction Machine". The paper finishes by discussing not only the benefits of viewing an economic system through the lens of exchange, and therefore mutual aid, reciprocity, and redistribution, but also by emphasizing - as Kenneth Boulding has shown us - that social life is full of one-way transfers which are essential to a deeper understanding of our political economy and non-market machinery.

In this paper I discuss how Law and Economics can benefit from incorporating some insights from Public Choice into their analyses. Within this argument, I examine the evolution of experimental methods by looking at laboratory, field, and natural experiments; and conducting a very simple scientometrics analysis on the relative frequency of experimental studies in journals such as Public Choice, Journal of Law and Economics, and Journal of Law, Economics and Organization in comparison to top economics journals such as American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Econometrica, or Review of Economic Studies. I also refer to the connectivity of Behavioral Law and Economics and Behavioral Public Choice. The paper then finishes with a discussion of a selected number of topics covering areas such as corruption, tax compliance, shitstorms/firestorms, constitutional choices, globalization and international organizations; all of which present scientific challenges when applying pure Law and Economics approaches without also implementing a Public Choice analysis.

AbstractAfter first providing an overview of useful survey data sources and commonly studied variables in the area of tax compliance, this article outlines the major tools and exploratory methods used in the field, including laboratory and field experiments, simulations and surveys. It also discusses future possibilities and the data required to progress in this area. It is thus particularly useful as a guide for those planning or just beginning to work in the tax compliance field.

Historically, tax compliance has been a highly interdisciplinary avenue of research to which economics, psychology, law, sociology, history, political science, and accountancy have made valuable contributions. It is less well understood, however, whether we can glean useful insights into tax compliance by moving beyond the social sciences. In particular, the literature pays little attention to the relevance of biology. This paper attempts to remedy this shortcoming by examining the potential opportunities and limitations of introducing biological concepts into tax compliance research.

This study tries to remedy the current lack of tax compliance research analyzing tax morale in 10 Eastern European countries that joined the European Union in 2004 or 2007. By exploring tax morale differences between 1999 and 2008 we show that tax morale has decreased in 7 out of 10 Eastern European countries. This lack of sustainability may support the incentive based conditionality hypothesis that European Union has only a limited ability to influence tax morale over time. We observe that events and processes at the country level are crucial to understanding tax morale. Factors such as perceived government quality, trust in the justice system and the government are positively correlated with tax morale in 2008.

This study tries to remedy the current lack of tax compliance research analyzing tax morale in 10 Eastern European countries that joined the European Union in 2004 or 2007. By exploring tax morale differences between 1999 and 2008 we show that tax morale has decreased in 7 out of 10 Eastern European countries. This lack of sustainability may support the incentive based conditionality hypothesis that European Union has only a limited ability to influence tax morale over time. We observe that events and processes at the country level are crucial to understanding tax morale. Factors such as perceived government quality, trust in the justice system and the government are positively correlated with tax morale in 2008. [Copyright The Regents of the University of California; published by Elsevier Ltd.]