EconPol Working Paper Series

Voter attitudes towards the welfare state, its specific programs, or specific people who are supposed to “benefit” from the implied social transfers have always been of vital interest for discussions in the public and political spheres. In this working paper, Peter Grand and Guido Tiemann (EconPol Europe, IHS Vienna) examine public sentiments concerning the conditionality of unemployment benefits and find that opinion is influenced by the supposed level of 'deservedness', along with economic, social, and institutional context.

While tax administrations have made considerable progress in fighting tax evasion, it remains a seemingly inextricable part of our world. Exploiting unique datasets covering over 28,000 tax evaders in the Netherlands, Wouter Leenders, Arjan Lejour, Simon Rabaté and Maarten van’t Riet investigate the distribution of tax evasion and its implications for the measurement of wealth inequality. They show that the distributional pattern of tax evasion depends on the type of tax evasion, e.g. it depends on the offshore country of choice. They explore a number of explanations to account for the differences in results and caution against projecting distributional patterns of detected tax evasion onto still undetected evasion. 
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This working paper, from António Afonso, João Tovar Jalles and Ana Venâncio, evaluates the effects of structural tax reforms on government spending efficiency in a sample of OECD economies over the period 2007-2016. Increases in tax rates result in falling public efficiency, with the negative effect found to be more significant for increases in personal income tax and value added tax. In times of economic expansion, increasing the corporate income tax base and reducing personal income tax rates were found to have a positive impact on public sector efficiency. In recessions, efficiency improves when the personal income tax and value added tax bases increase and the corporate income tax rate increases. 

António Afonso, João Tovar Jalles, Ana Venâncio have conducted a review of the literature dealing with overall public sector performance and efficiency, defining a methodology to assess public sector efficiency and create a novel and large cross-sectional panel dataset of government indicators and public sector efficiency scores. The focus is on a balanced sample covering all 36 OECD countries over the time period between 2006 and 2017. The authors have defined a set of economic and sociodemographic metrics necessary to construct performance composite indicators and calculated and reported a full set of (input and output oriented) efficiency scores based on the performance indicators previously computed.

Is green consumerism beneficial to the environment and the economy? To shed light on this question, Stefan Ambec and Philippe De Donder study the political economy of environmental regulations in a model with neutral and green consumers where the latter derive some warm glow from buying a good of higher environmental quality produced by a profit-maximizing monopoly, while the good bought by neutral consumers is provided by a competitive fringe.