Majority Voting and the Welfare Implications of Tax Avoidance

Publication Type  Preprints
Author  Christian Traxler
Year of Publication  2009
Issue  2009/22
Abstract  A benchmark result in the political economy of taxation is that majority voting over a linear income tax schedule will result in an inefficiently high tax rate whenever the median voter has a below average income. The present paper examines the role of tax avoidance for this welfare assessment. We find that the inefficiency in the voting equilibrium is the lower, the higher the average level of tax avoidance in the economy, or equivalently, the lower the median voter's amount of avoidance. The result holds for endogenous avoidance and labor choice and, under certain conditions, for an endogenous enforcement policy.
Publisher  Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods
Place Published  Bonn
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Published in:  Journal of Public Economics, vol. 96, no. 1-2, pp. 1-9, 2012
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Keywords  Majority voting, Tax avoidance, welfare analysis, median voter equilibrium
JEL-Codes  H26, D72, D6