Purpose This study explores the response of consumer confidence in policy uncertainty in the Japanese context. The study also considers the dynamism of stock market behavior and financial stress and its impact on consumer confidence, which has remained unaddressed in the literature. The role of these control variables has important implications for policy discussions, particularly when other countries can learn from Japanese experiences. Design/methodology/approach The nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model postulated by Shin et al. (2014) was used for studying the asymmetric response of consumer confidence to policy uncertainty. This method has improved estimates compared to traditional linear cointegration methods. Findings The findings confirm the asymmetric impact of policy uncertainty on the consumer confidence index in Japan. The impact of the rise in policy uncertainty is greater than that of a fall in asymmetry on consumer confidence in Japan. Furthermore, the Wald test confirmed asymmetric behavior. Originality/value The contribution of this study is threefold. First, this study contributes to the extant literature by analyzing the asymmetric response of consumer confidence to policy uncertainty, controlling for both the financial stress and stock price indices. Second, to test the robustness of the exercise, the study utilized different frequencies of observations. Third, this study is the first to utilize the concept of Arbatli et al. (2017) to formulate a combined index of uncertainty based on economic policy uncertainty index, along with uncertainty indices such as fiscal, monetary, trade and exchange rate policies to study the overall impact of policy uncertainty.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to extend the literature on the spillovers across economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and cryptocurrency uncertainty indices. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses cross-country economic policy uncertainty indices and the novel data measuring the cryptocurrency price uncertainties over the period 2013–2021 to construct a sample of 946 observations and applies the time-varying parameter vector autoregression (TVP-VAR) model to do an empirical study. Findings The findings suggest that there are cross-country spillovers of economic policy uncertainty. In addition, the total uncertainty spillover between economic policies and cryptocurrency peaked in 2015 before gradually decreasing in the following periods. Concomitantly, the cryptocurrency uncertainty has acted as the “receiver.” More importantly, the authors found the predictive power of economic policy uncertainty to predict the cryptocurrency uncertainty index. This paper’s results hold robust when using alternative measurement of cryptocurrency policy uncertainty. Originality/value This study is the first research that deeply investigates the association between two uncertainty indicators, namely economic policy uncertainty and the cryptocurrency uncertainty index. We provide fresh evidence about the dynamic connectedness between country-level economic policy uncertainty and the cryptocurrency index. Our work contributes a new channel driving the variants of uncertainties in the cryptocurrency market.

This study seeks to analyze and enhance understanding of taxpayer compliance with tax obligations in a systematic way by using the cost-benefit approach. Data from a sample of 250 audited service tax payers are used to examine the compliance factors. The hypotheses are tested using Spearman’s rho for ordinal variables and biserial correlation for dichotomous data. A decision matrix is used to make a logical conclusion on the business firm reporting behavior based on the derived expected utility value and compliance level. The results show a positive significant correlation between taxable sales, return submission and taxpayer compliance, but taxpayer compliance has a negative relationship with deficiency amount, penalty, and three other variables. The study suggests that minor penalties are unlikely to deter non-compliant behavior and economic factors seem to exert more influence on compliance. The methodology and matrix diagram can be customized to the requirements of tax audit management for assisting in audit case selection and strategy program to detect under-declaration and minimize shortfall in tax revenue. The taxpayer compliance-Correlation-Expected utility matrix analyzes the taxpayer’s expected utility function and compliance behavior, and provides an insight to what the most likely decision of a taxpayer is under certain assumptions.

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