Claims that the VAT facilitates tax enforcement by generating paper trails on transactions between firms contributed to widespread VAT adoption worldwide, but there is surprisingly little evidence. This paper analyzes the role of third-party information for VAT enforcement through two randomized experiments among over 400,000 Chilean firms. Announcing additional monitoring has less impact on transactions that are subject to a paper trail, indicating the paper trail's preventive deterrence effect. This leads to strong enforcement spillovers up the VAT chain. These findings confirm that when taking evasion into account, significant differences emerge between otherwise equivalent forms of taxation.
What motivates regional governments to subsidize firm relocations and what are the implications of the subsidy competition among them? In this paper, I address these questions using a quantitative economic geography model which I calibrate to U.S. states. I show that states have strong incentives to subsidize firm relocations in order to gain at the expense of other states. I also show that subsidy competition creates large distortions so that there is much to gain from a cooperative approach. Overall, I find that manufacturing real income can be up to 3.9 percent higher if states stop competing over firms.
I show that accounting for cross-industry variation in trade elasticities greatly magnifies the estimated gains from trade. The main idea is as simple as it is general: while imports in the average industry do not matter too much, imports in some industries are critical to the functioning of the economy, so that a complete shutdown of international trade is very costly overall.
È necessaria una svolta radicale nella politica del governo su ricerca e innovazione. Le evidenze più recenti della scienza economica testimoniano che la crescita di lungo periodo ha due motori.
We test the impact of a peer group savings program on precautionary savings, through two randomized field experiments among 2,687 microcredit clients. The first experiment finds that the Peer Group Treatment, which combines public goal setting, monitoring in the group, and non-financial rewards, increases savings in a new savings account significantly. The number of deposits grows 3.7-fold, and the average savings balance almost doubles. In contrast, a more classical measure, a substantially increased interest rate, has no effect for most participants and raises the savings balance only for the very top of the distribution. A second experiment, conducted a year later, tests an alternative delivery mechanism and shows that effects of similar size can be achieved through feedback text messages, without meetings, rewards, or peer pressure.
Zunehmende Ungleichheit gefährdet künftiges Wachstum, weil sie den gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt schwächt und Unterstützung für schädliche politische Strömungen schafft.
Constructing joint confidence bands for structural impulse response functions based on a VAR model is a difficult task because of the non-linear nature of such functions. We propose new joint confidence bands that cover the entire true structural impulse response function up to a chosen maximum horizon with a prespecified probability (1 − α), at least asymptotically. Such bands are based on a certain bootstrap procedure from the multiple testing literature. We compare the finite-sample properties of our method with those of existing methods via extensive Monte Carlo simulations. We also investigate the effect of endogenizing the lag order in our bootstrap procedure on the finite-sample properties. Furthermore, an empirical application to a real data set is provided.
I suggest a novel theory of GATT/WTO negotiations based on Krugman's "new trade" model. It emphasizes international production relocations and is easy to calibrate to bilateral trade data. Focusing on the major players in recent GATT/WTO negotiations, I find that it implies reasonable noncooperative tariffs as well as moderate gains from GATT/WTO negotiations.
Reducing tax evasion is a key priority for many governments, particularly in developing countries. A growing literature has argued that the ability to verify taxpayer self-reports against reports from third parties is critical for modern tax enforcement and the growth of state capacity. However, there may be limits to the effectiveness of third-party information if taxpayers can make offsetting adjustments on less verifiable margins. We present a simple framework to demonstrate the conditions under which this will occur and provide strong empirical evidence for such behavior by exploiting a natural experiment in Ecuador. We find that when firms are notified by the tax authority about detected revenue discrepancies on previously filed corporate income tax returns, they increase reported revenues, matching the third-party estimate when provided. Firms also increase reported costs by 96 cents for every dollar of revenue adjustment, resulting in minor increases in total tax collection.
