IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-03954598.html

The response of taxpayer compliance to the large shock of Italian unification

Author

Listed:
  • Antonio Acconcia
  • Marcello d'Amato
  • Riccardo Martina
  • Marisa Ratto

    (LEDa - Laboratoire d'Economie de Dauphine - IRD - Institut de Recherche pour le Développement - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

Because of differences in the levels of taxation among pre-unitary states, Italian unification in 1861 determined differential increments in the tax burden among areas of the country. We constructed an index of these tax shocks and collected province-level data on historical and current indicators of tax evasion to evaluate the impact of the unification on tax compliance. We show that the historical variability in tax evasion reduced a lot in the following decades and that the convergence process preserved quite well the ranking in compliance among provinces. We also find that the shock to the tax burden explains much of the historical and current variability in tax evasion. The role of local congestion externalities, arising within a decentralized system of tax enforcement as that set in Italy, is formally explored to account for such evidence.

Suggested Citation

  • Antonio Acconcia & Marcello d'Amato & Riccardo Martina & Marisa Ratto, 2022. "The response of taxpayer compliance to the large shock of Italian unification," Post-Print hal-03954598, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03954598
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mauro, Luciano & Pigliaru, Francesco & Carmeci, Gaetano, 2023. "Decentralization, social capital, and regional growth: The case of the Italian North-South divide," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 78(C).
    2. Luciano Mauro & Francesco Pigliaru, 2024. "Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan: Will it Narrow the North–South Productivity Gap?," Italian Economic Journal: A Continuation of Rivista Italiana degli Economisti and Giornale degli Economisti, Springer;Società Italiana degli Economisti (Italian Economic Association), vol. 10(3), pages 1281-1307, November.
    3. Sergio Galletta & Tommaso Giommoni, 2024. "War Violence Exposure and Tax Compliance," CESifo Working Paper Series 11230, CESifo.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D62 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Externalities
    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • H26 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Tax Evasion and Avoidance
    • K41 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Litigation Process
    • K42 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03954598. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.