Cheating in Europe: underreporting of self-employment income in comparative perspective

Abstract

Various national studies have used the expenditure method (Pissarides and Weber in J Public Econ 39(1):17–32, 1989) to estimate income underreporting by the self-employed relative to the wage earners. Within Europe, the studies mostly consider the UK or individual Nordic countries, while no data are available for most Southern European and Eastern European countries. This paper is the first to apply the expenditure method to a large number of EU countries using harmonised microdata and a common model specification to enhance cross-country comparability. We extend the number of countries studied using the expenditure method and contribute to the scarce comparative literature on tax non-compliance in general. Our estimates show substantial variation in income underreporting across countries, from under 10% to more than 40% of self-employed household income on average. The shares of underreporting do not appear to be related to the development level of the countries.