Tommaso Giommoni

War Experience and Tax Compliance

Tommaso Giommoni, joint with Sergio Galletta, has explored the impact of the exposure to war violence on individuals’ willingness to comply with tax laws. Using newly digitized historical administrative records on individual tax declarations in the Italian aftermath of World War I, they find that having a family member who died on the battlefield significantly decreases tax compliance. To account for potential endogeneity of the treatment, they use an instrumental variable strategy exploiting the exogenous allocation of soldiers to more/less risky military units. These findings are consistent with the idea that war can undermine individuals’ trust in the state, reducing their willingness to contribute to public goods via the tax system.

Mr. Giommoni’s research interests include Public Economics, Political Economy and Public Finance. In a joint project with Andreas Peichl, Gabriel Loumeau, and Pascal Zamorski, he is also investigating the effects of different inheritance rules on income and gender inequality in the very long run. They have examined the unique environment during the Ancien Régime in France, which had differing inheritance legislations. This special setting allows the researchers to estimate a Regression-Discontinuity-Design model exploiting the borders of the different legislations in order to measure the impact of inheritance laws when the system was in force, and after its abrogation. Using two different datasets, they studied the impact of the inheritance legislation in the short run (when the policy was in force) and in the long-run (until today, two centuries after its abrogation).

Tommaso Giommoni is a Post-Doctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, Chair of Public Economics, and he is affiliated to the Carlo F. Dondena Centre and to the Baffi CAREFIN at Bocconi University. He obtained his PhD in Economics and Finance from Bocconi University in 2019.