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 numbers 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 intention of this paper is to analyse how audit courts and local autonomy affect political discussion, controlling in a multivariate analysis for a broad variety of potential factors focusing on Switzerland, due to its variety of audit court competences and its strong decentralised structure. With data from the World Values Survey 1995-1997 (Swiss data 1996) evidence has been found that a higher audit court competence and a lower level of centralization is correlated with a higher level of political discussion. Thus, the results in Switzerland suggest that such institutions help improve citizens’ willingness to acquire information costs and discuss political matters.

Government accountability through electoral engagement, involvement and participation in the political debate can affect government performance. Using data for the full sample of Swiss cantons over the 1981–2001 period, this paper provides empirical evidence that government accountability is crucial for fiscal discipline. Specifically, in cantons with high levels of government accountability, the level of indebtedness is significantly lower, indicating that accountability supports fiscal discipline. To obtain a useful approximation for government accountability between citizens and their representatives, we use information from direct voter participation in political decisions (initiatives and public referenda) in Swiss state (cantonal) governments. Electoral support of government proposals reveals an important aspect of accountability in a real world setting.

Using information collected from American Economic Review publications of the last 100 years, we try to provide answers to various questions: Which are the top AER publishing institutions and countries? Which are the top AER papers based on citation success? How frequently is someone able to publish in AER? How equally is citation success distributed? Who are the top AER publishing authors? What is the level of cooperation among the authors? What drives the alphabetical name ordering? What are the individual characteristics of the AER authors, editors, editorial board members, and referees? How frequently do women publish in AER? What is the relationship between academic age, publication performance, and citation success? What are the paper characteristics? What influences the level of technique used in articles? Do connections have an influence on citation success? Who receives awards? Can awards increase the probability of publishing in AER at a later stage?

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.

In recent years the topics of illegal activities such as corruption or tax evasion have attracted a great deal of attention. However, there is still a lack of substantial empirical evidence about the determinants of compliance. The aim of this paper is to investigate empirically whether women are more willing to be compliant than men and whether we observe (among women and in general) differences in attitudes among similar age groups in different time periods (cohort effect) or changing attitudes of the same cohorts over time (age effect) using data from eight Western European countries from the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey that span the period from 1981 to 1999. The results reveal higher willingness to comply among women and an age rather than a cohort effect.

Considerable evidence suggests that enforcement efforts cannot fully explain the high degree of tax compliance. To resolve this puzzle of tax compliance several researchers have argued that citizens’ attitudes toward paying taxes defined as tax morale helps to explain the high degree of tax compliance. However, most studies have treated tax morale as a black box without discussing which factors shape it. Additionally, the tax compliance literature provides little empirical research that investigates attitudes toward paying taxes in Europe. Thus, this paper is unique in its examination of citizen tax morale within three multicultural European countries, Switzerland, Belgium and Spain, a choice that allows far more detailed examination of the impact of culture and institutions using datasets from the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey.

Why so many people pay their taxes, even though fines and audit probability are low, is a central question in the tax compliance literature. Positing a homo economicus having a refined motivation structure sheds light on this puzzle. This paper provides empirical evidence for the relevance of conditional cooperation, using survey data from 30 West and East European countries. We find a high correlation between perceived tax evasion and tax morale. The results remain robust after exploiting endogeneity and conducting several robustness tests. We also observe a strong positive correlation between institutional quality and tax morale.

The literature on volunteering has strongly increased over the last few years. However, there is still a lack of substantial empirical evidence on the determinants of environmental participation. This empirical study analyses a cross-section of individuals using micro-data from the World Values Survey wave III (1995-1997), which covers 38 countries, to investigate this question. The results suggest that individuals’ active participation in environmental organizations is influenced not only by socio-demographic and socio-economic factors, but also by political attitudes. Furthermore, we observe regional differences. Interestingly, environmental participation seems to be a more important channel for action in developing countries, where weak and dysfunctional states make people pursue their goals through non-governmental sector activities. We also find that a higher level of perceived corruption promotes participation in environmental organizations, which shows that individuals take action when they feel that the government is corrupt.

Research evidence on the impact of relative income position on individuals’ attitudes and behaviour is sorely lacking. Therefore, using the International Social Survey Programme 1998 data from 26 countries this paper investigates the impact of relative income on 14 measurements of social capital. We find support for a considerable deleterious positional concern effect of persons below the reference income. This effect is more sizeable by far than the beneficial impact of a relative income advantage. Most of the results indicate that such an effect is non-linear. Lastly, changing the reference group (regional versus national) produces no significant differences in the results.