Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 26th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview The Impact of Behavioral Economics on Policy-Making Author(s) Sebastian Lazar University "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" Iasi Iasi Romania Zugravu Bogdan Gabriel, Dornean Adina, Title Taxes and General Public Services. An Empirical Investigation File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Sebastian Lazar Abstract The paper investigates the determinants of taxes collected net of public services for a sample of countries from all over the world over 1996-2016 period. By taxes collected net of public services we mean the difference between taxes to GDP ratio and general public services expenditures to the GDP ratio. Basically, we captured the tax related cost of government (the lower the figure, the better) which provides a very informative estimate to the funds available to other government functions (education, healthcare, etc.). The main determinants looked upon were worldwide governance indicators (WGI): control of corruption, government effectiveness, political stability, regulatory quality, rule of law and voice and accountability, taken from World Bank surveys. As control variable we used GDP per capita annual growth rate. We include year fixed effects in order to control for global economic crisis, and also country fixed effects to control for unobservable country-level factors that are constant over the sample period. Policy recommendation were made accordingly.