Suchergebnisse

Literature on tax evasion has generally ignored the effects of tax evasion by a monopolist in a regulatory environment. When the government is asymmetrically informed about the monopolist's demand and/or costs, however, the fIrm may have the opportunity to cheat on its regulatory constraint and tax payments. Adjustments in the regulatory constraint then will directly impact on the tax revenues of the government while alterations in tax policies may alter the effectiveness and efficiency results of a particular regulatory policy. To analyze these issues two forms of regulation, a price ceiling regulation and a fixed profit per unit regulation are considered in an environment where the government is incompletely informed about the monopolist's cost function. For the price ceiling regulation (Chapter 2) it is shown that tax evasion decisions are affected by variations in the ceiling in the sense that an increase in the effective price ceiling results in misreporting by a larger proportion. Tax evasion decisions however are found not to affect output decisions of the monopolist. Thus the optimal price ceiling under evasion is set at the same level as without tax evasion, i.e., at the point where price equals expected marginal cost. Optimality in this economy can be achieved in a number of ways. Full compliance is one way but optimality can also be achieved with tax evasion. When the form of regulation considered is a fixed profit-per-unit regulation (Chapter 3), the results are quite different from above. Because profits of the monopolist are not costlessly observable by the government, fIrms can cheat on the regulatory constraint itself. Thus output and tax evasion to affect the monopolist's output. Literature on tax evasion has often neglected the fact that income from different sources is taxed at different rates and provides different opportunities for misreporting. Once an individual obtains certain skills, his flexibility in switching jobs to evade taxes on his wage income becomes limited. Also the fact that a large part of the wage income in the U.S. is reported to the government by the employer and often withheld at the source, greatly limits the opportunity for evading wage taxes. However an individual faces many options when deciding on how to invest his savings and the income from at least some of these may not be subject to withholding and reporting. This fact suggests that the savings of an individual can be affected by tax evading opportunities. Chapter 4 examines this problem by considering a dynamic model of tax evasion. The results show that an increase in the penalty rate or audit probability leads to an increase in savings of the individual, given some assumptions on preferences. This fact implies that savings are reduced by the possibility of tax evasion. It also suggests that savings could be increased by stricter enforcement of tax laws. Because the model used in chapter 4 is fairly complicated, some of the comparative static results are found to be ambiguous under general conditions. It is also not clear from the theory what the optimal policy of the government would be. To address these issues in more details, chapter 5 considers some numerical exercises. A number of results emerge from these exercises. First, savings are found to increase with an increase in either the penalty rate or the audit rate, even when the restrictive assumptions on risk aversion do not hold and labor supply is variable. Second, full compliance seems to be the optimal policy of the government for the specification selected. These results seem to hold both for compensated and uncompensated taxes. ; Ph. D.

AbstractA descent algorithm simultaneously capable of solving linear programming, piecewise linear convex minimization, and the linear complementarity problem is developed. Conditions are given under which a solution can be found in a finite number of iterations using the geometry of the problem. A computer algorithm is developed and test problems are solved by both this method and Lemke's algorithm. Current results indicate a decrease in the number of cells visited but an increase in the total number of pivots needed to solve the problem.

"Gini Coefficient or Gini Index was originally defined as a standardized measure of statistical dispersion intended to understand an income distribution. It has evolved into quantifying inequity in all kinds of distributions of wealth, gender parity, access to education and health services, environmental policies, and numerous other attributes of importance. Gini Inequality Index: Methods and Applications features original high-quality peer-reviewed chapters prepared by internationally acclaimed researchers."

Abstract
This paper investigates technical efficiency and productivity growth in Indian life insurance industry in the era of deregulation. The empirical study uses DEA method and Malmquist productivity index to measure and decompose technical efficiency and productivity growth, respectively. The results suggest that the growth in overall productivity is mainly attributed to improvement in efficiency. Higher pure technical efficiency and lower scale efficiency indicate the insurance firms have generally, moved away from the optimal scale over the study period. The truncated regression exploring the main drivers of efficiency in the long run found claims ratio, distribution ratio, and firm-size influence technical efficiency positively. The study also found firms that had both life and non-life businesses are more efficient than firms that has only life insurance business.

This study examines the possible impact of cross‐country differences in culture on earnings management or choices of accounting accruals in five Asia‐Pacific countries: Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore. A set of traditional and cultural variables were used to test the hypotheses developed in the paper. The results indicate that both the traditional variables (size and debt‐equity ratio) and cultural variables (individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance and long‐term social values) can explain the choices of accounting accruals in different countries. This paper is the first that links earnings management to cultural values and indirectly provides evidence that accounting values (as defined by Gray, 1998) affect earnings management.