International Tax and Public Finance最新文献

We propose a novel framework that revisits the seminal Chamley-Judd zero capital taxation result in light of bounded rationality stemming from a finite policy planning horizon and structural frictions in fiscal institutions. We show a mechanism that generates positive optimal capital taxation in the long run. Our numerical results indicate that the current tax system in the United States could be near-optimal in a constrained environment where policymakers exhibit limited policy planning horizons and imperfect altruism toward household welfare under subsequent governments.

We examine the relation between corporate social responsibility [CSR] and international profit shifting. We find consistent evidence that CSR is adversely related to profit shifting within European and US multinational firms. Additional results document that less profit shifting occurs in multinational firms that show high performance in the social or corporate governance dimensions. For US multinational firms, we find that the CSR performance is negatively related to profit shifting, particularly if a multinational firm faces fewer reputational concerns or competitive threats. Our findings point to a corporate culture in which, for international tax planning through profit shifting, CSR and tax payments complement each other.

This paper documents the effect on wages of one of the most far-reaching French economic reforms of the past decade. The reform, implemented between 2013 and 2018, provided a corporate tax credit proportional to the payroll for those employees paid no more than 2.5 times the French minimum legal wage. The aim of the reform was to increase competitiveness and employment by reducing labor costs through a corporate tax credit. It is shown here that a significant part of the tax credit paid to firms actually increased wages, missing the reform’s initial target. Insofar as almost all companies were affected by the reform, an innovative evaluation method is used here to simulate a counterfactual scenario for wages using branch data from France’s national accounts. This method successfully estimates the specific impact of the reform on wages and it is robust to several checks, such as placebo estimates. The present contribution to the literature is threefold. First, we propose a novel methodology of policy evaluation specially designed for the absence of a counterfactual. Second, and unlike most public policy evaluation studies, national accounts data are used instead of firm-data. Third, the partial equilibrium results presented in the article are particularly relevant for calibrating a macroeconomic model accounting for general equilibrium effects. Indeed, the reform amounted to a cut in corporate taxes equivalent to 1% of GDP, therefore constituting a sizable macroeconomic shock.

This study presents detailed estimates of the shadow economy's size and development in all European Union (EU) countries with particular emphasis on six specific countries (Germany, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Italy, and Romania) from 2003 to 2022. It focuses on understanding the key factors that motivate economic agents to engage in shadow economy activities within EU and particularly these countries. The estimates presented show a significant reduction in the shadow economy's size from 22.6% of GDP in 2003 to 17.3% in 2022, highlighting the effectiveness of various policy measures implemented in most EU countries with particular focus on these six countries. Despite a slight increase in the shadow economy across most EU nations due to the Coronavirus pandemic after 2020, our research identifies the main determinants of economic informality in most EU countries. Our analysis expose that weak institutional quality, ineffective government institutions, complex and burdensome tax and regulatory systems, the lack of strong legal systems, and pervasive corruption are the main determinants of economic informality in most countries of the EU. The study thoroughly reviews the driving forces behind the shadow economy and discusses the specific policy measures these six countries part of this policy analysis paper have adopted to mitigate and reduce its presence.

We assess the impact of a Swedish regulatory change, which required businesses with any business-to-consumer transactions, whether by cash or card, to use a certified electronic cash register (ECR), on reported revenue. To do this, we use administrative data on the monthly reported revenue of all affected firms and a staggered difference-in-differences approach. Our findings indicate that there was an immediate increase of about 2.7–4.3% in reported revenue following the implementation of a certified ECR. However, the effect was temporary and diminished to zero after just a few months, which indicates that firms found innovative methods to underreport their revenue.

This article proposes a hybrid national accounts (NA)-macroeconometric approach to fill the gap between the demand for reliable and internationally comparable estimates and the sparse availability of official statistics based on the NA approach. The proposed method combines data from Eurostat’s Tabular approach for the exhaustiveness of NA with estimates based on theoretical hypotheses on the drivers of non-observed production. We estimate underground, informal, and illegal economies for 22 European countries over the period 2000–2020.

In this paper, I analyze the local labor market consequences of multinational firms reallocating employees across their affiliates in response to antitax avoidance policies. I leverage the introduction of a worldwide debt cap in 2010 in the United Kingdom as a quasi-natural experiment that limited one of the forms of profit shifting—debt shifting—for a group of multinational corporations (MNCs). Multinationals affected by the reform reallocated their employees from the United Kingdom to foreign locations. I show that this led to a reduction in employment in regions more exposed to the reform in the United Kingdom. In foreign countries, the initial reallocation of labor across firms resulted in a relatively larger expansion of the affected local labor markets. These results suggest that a reallocation of labor across firms generates asymmetries in how negative and positive firm-level shocks are amplified through regional markets.

About half of government expenditure in the United States takes the form of government consumption (e.g., education, defense, infrastructure). In many studies of post-tax inequality based on the Dina framework (including the influential study by Piketty et al. (Q J Econ 133(2):553–609, 2018), government consumption is allocated either proportionally to post-tax disposable income or on a per-capita basis, and the level of inequality is fairly sensitive to this choice. This paper provides direct evidence on how public education spending (a substantial part of government consumption) is actually distributed. An allocation proportional to post-tax disposable income is clearly rejected, while a lump-sum allocation is found to provide a good approximation.

We expand the theory of politician quality in electoral democracies with citizen candidates by supposing that performance while in office sends a signal to the voters about the politician’s valence. Individuals live two periods and decide to become candidates when young, trading off against type-specific private wages. The valence signal increases the reelection chances of high valence incumbents (screening mechanism of reelection), and thus their expected gain from running for office (self-selection mechanism). Since self-selection improves the average quality of challengers, voters become more demanding when evaluating the incumbent’s performance. This complementarity between the self-selection and the screening mechanisms may lead to multiple equilibria. We show that more difficult and/or less variable political jobs increase the politicians’ quality. Conversely, societies with more wage inequality have lower quality polities. We also show that incumbency advantage blurs the screening mechanism by giving incumbents an upper-hand in electoral competition and may wipe out the positive effect of the screening mechanism on the quality of the polity.

This study explores empirically how business owners respond to dividend taxes in a range of different margins including tax planning and investment. Using administrative tax data on all privately held Finnish corporations, I find exceptionally clear dividend payment responses to tax rate discontinuities and changes. Studying the income composition of owners around tax changes reveals clear income shifting between wage and dividends with negligible effect on gross income received from the firm. Evidence on the asset composition of firms indicates that a notable part of the payment response is due to inter-temporal income-smoothing, while I observe no statistically significant real responses in output or investment. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that more experienced owners and owners with lower income have higher tax base elasticities.