Search Results

Today’s New York Times accuses President Bush of getting things “exactly backwards” by exhorting Congress to demonstrate political courage by resisting the urge to raise taxes. The politically courageous move, the Times says, would be to raise taxes (i.e., to refuse to extend the 2003 cuts beyond their expiration date). In particular, the Times calls for brave lawmakers to eliminate the “special low tax rates for investment income,” which “overwhelmingly enrich the rich and will be even harder to justify in the years to come, when, by all reasonable estimates, the country’s financial outlook will have deteriorated further.” It was, the Times says, “Orwellian” for President Bush to suggest that courage would be required to extend the tax cuts on investment income.

Read the full piece here. 

Summary

In this short essay, we take on some of the common claims surrounding the law and economics of the backdating of options. Most of these claims are rooted in the basic argument that backdating options amounts to concealment of compensation. While we agree that backdating may have amounted to a technical rule violation in some cases, there is actually no concealment and, in fact, backdated options are fully disclosed when granted, and their value incorporated into stock price. We also challenge a few other myths surrounding the practice of backdating options.

Abstract

Tax evasion is still widespread around the world, among the most advanced countries too. Its level in Italy is comparatively very high, as it is commonly recognized. This essay offers a broad non-technical outline of the main topics concerning tax evasion, from the economist’s point of view. The first section introduces the paper, summarizes its main contents, and depicts the basic conclusions and suggestions. The second section is devoted to a critical survey of existing empirical estimates on evasion magnitude, both in Italy and in other Western countries. Some figures on tax evasion consequences in Italy are then briefly discussed. The third section focuses on individuals’ decision to evade, inside the framework built on the classical grounds of Allingham-Sandmo’s (A/S) model. It scrutinizes A/S model’s hypotheses and implications and finally introduces some other factors which may prove relevant for the decision to evade taxes. According to this framework, the fourth section analytically derives the main properties of new audit procedures, recently adopted or proposed in Italy

NOTE: The paper is in Italian.