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Tax evasion seems to be a growing problem in almost all countries. The paper analyses the possibilities and limitations of game-theoretical aspects to analyse tax evasion. However, empirical findings indicate that most people pay more taxes than the traditional economic approach would predict. Thus, it might be important to go a step back and analyse tax morale, the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes, as endogenous variable. With data from the World Values Survey (WVS), choosing Canada, strong evidence has been found that trust in government, pride, and religiosity have a systematic positive influence on tax morale. This effect tends to persist even after controlling for age, income, education, gender, marital status, employment status. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In the spirit of previous work in the compliance literature (e.g., tax, littering), we investigate whether environmental social norms affect volunteering in environmental organizations. Using two ‘environmental morale’ variables as indirect measures, we analyze the impact of social norms on the incidence of unpaid work in environmental organizations. In addition, we test whether violation of a specific environmental norm initiates a conditional cooperation response. We explore a large individual data set covering 32 countries from both Western and Eastern Europe, and extend the number of countries investigated to test the robustness of the relationship at the macro level. Our results indicate a strong positive relationship between the proxies for environmental social norms and volunteering in environmental organizations. The relationship persists despite our various robustness checks. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]