Gaute Torsvik

Compliance Effects of Tax Enforcement Policies

Gaute Torsvik is currently finishing two projects that investigate these policies. One uses voluntary disclosure applications to estimate the effect of international information exchange agreements between Norway and tax havens. The other estimates the compliance effects of risk-based audits. In 2013, the Norwegian tax administration conducted an experiment with random audits in order to use machine learning methods to estimate the risk profile of taxpayers. The following year they audited every taxpayer with a risk score above a certain threshold. Mr Torsvik compares the future tax compliance of those just above and below the audit threshold and find that audits have a strong and lasting effect on the filing behaviour of taxpayers. He intends to use this information to calibrate optimal audit policy.

Mr Torsvik is an applied economist who works on labour economics, public economics and development economics. While visiting CESifo, Mr Torsvik will work on a project that examines gender differences in pay and productivity in a firm that uses performance pay to motivate their workers. The data contain weekly individual productivity measures over a long time period. He is able to use the data to estimate a range of interesting parameters; for example, whether there is a gender difference in productivity and pay, if motherhood has an effect on work productivity and if there is a difference in how male and female workers respond to monetary incentives.

Gaute Torsvik is Professor of Economics at the University of Oslo, having previously served as Professor at the University of Bergen. He holds a doctorate from the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration (NHH) in Bergen. Mr Torsvik is a CESifo Research Network Fellow. His research has appeared in publications including Health Policy and Planning, the Journal of Health Economics, Games and Economic Behaviour, the Journal of Development Economics, the Journal of Public Economic Theory, the Journal of Labor Economics, the International Economic Review and the European Journal of Political Economy.