The burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas emits gases into the atmosphere that act like the glass roof of a greenhouse, trapping the sun’s heat and preventing it from escaping into space, thereby increasing the temperature of the planet. This warming of the Earth is causing...

In a two-country model, the citizens of a ‘big home country’ can either fictitiously move residence to a ‘small foreign country’ where residence-based taxes are lower (external tax avoidance), or under-report the tax base at home (internal tax avoidance). Tax setting is the result of Cournot-Nash competition between revenue maximizing...

Individual preferences over public policies should ideally be based on the possession of correct information about their reality. To test whether this holds, we conducted four waves of a survey, every six months since May 2020 (still under the COVID-19-lockdown), asking basic macro questions regarding the level of tax burden,...

This paper empirically tests whether property owners react to the salience of taxes in terms of their consumption of public services. Exploiting a policy change that reduced fares on public transport in various municipalities of the metropolitan area of Barcelona, we find that salience of the tax to finance the...

In 2013, we published an IEB Report on tax reform with the subtitle “We Have Outgrown the Garage and it Needs Clearing Out” – an analogy used by Lawrence Summers in reference to the evolution of tax systems. Nearly 10 years later, the garage has once again filled with clutter....

The shock of COVID-19 and the subsequent response has underscored the importance of the public sector’s role as a backstop. There is no doubt about that. The alternative to public-sector intervention would have been an unprecedented economic collapse. Indeed, unprecedented is more than a rhetorical expression: even with public intervention,...