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Matthias Kasper

Tulane University, USA

Designing appropriate tax policies requires understanding the impact of tax evasion and its true effects on income distribution. We hope that this paper will help policymakers better understand these impacts

IZA World of Labor role

Author

Current position

Postdoctoral Fellow, Tulane University, Department of Economics, USA

Research interest

Tax compliance, behavioral economics, public economics

Website

https://murphy.tulane.edu/people/matthias-kasper

Positions/functions as a policy advisor

US National Taxpayer Advocate, Austrian Ministry of Finance

Past positions

Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Vienna, Department of Applied Psychology (2016–2018)

Qualifications

PhD in Psychology, University of Vienna, Austria, 2019; PhD in International Business Taxation, WU Vienna, Austria, 2016

Selected publications

  • "Do audits deter or provoke future tax noncompliance? Evidence on self-employed taxpayers." CESifo Economic Studies (2020) (with S. Beer, B. Erard, and E. Kirchler).

  • “Tax policy and the news: An empirical analysis of taxpayers’ perceptions of tax-related media coverage and its impact on tax compliance.” Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics 54 (2015): 58–63 (with C. Kogler and E. Kirchler).

  • “Mental accounting of income tax and value added tax among self-employed business owners.” Journal of Economic Psychology 70 (2019): 125–139 (with J. Olsen, C. Kogler, S. Muehlbacher, and E. Kirchler).

  • “Emotions and tax compliance among small business owners: An experimental survey.” International Review of Law and Economics 56 (2018): 42–52 (with J. Olsen, J. Enachescu, S. Benk, T. Budak, and E. Kirchler).

  • "Laboratory experiments." In: van Rooij, B., and D. D. Sokol (eds). The Cambridge Handbook of Compliance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming (with J. Alm).

article(s)

  • Tax evasion, market adjustments, and income distribution Updated

    Market adjustments to tax evasion alter factor and product prices, which determine the true impacts and beneficiaries of tax evasion

    James AlmMatthias Kasper, February 2020
    How does tax evasion affect the distribution of income? In the standard analysis of tax evasion, all the benefits are assumed to accrue to tax evaders. However, tax evasion has other impacts that determine its true effects. As factors of production move from tax-compliant to tax-evading (informal) sectors, these market adjustments generate changes in relative prices of products and factors, thereby affecting what consumers pay and what workers earn. As a result, at least some of the gains from evasion are shifted to consumers of goods produced by tax evaders, and at least some of the returns to tax evaders are competed away via lower wages.
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