International Tax and Public Finance最新文献

Abstract

Unmarried women face a significantly lower average federal income tax rate than unmarried men, 6.3% versus 10.9%. Some of the difference arises because women have lower income on average and the tax system is progressive. Using a non-parametric decomposition analysis, we show that tax progressivity accounts for less than 60% of the gender tax rate difference, leaving the rest being explained by gender differences within income classes. This conclusion remains when the decomposition exercise uses an equivalence-scale-adjusted income and considers gender differences in nontaxable income and time use. Regression results reveal that much of the gender tax difference arises because unmarried women are more likely to live with dependents, making them more likely to claim child-related tax benefits relative to unmarried men. Our findings indicate that the current tax system places a high value of raising children beyond the consideration of the families’ larger consumption needs. Because our analysis does not consider the higher risk of economic insecurity facing single parents and the various externalities generated by women’s higher commitment to childcare, future research should focus on determining whether these additional considerations could justify the extent of the gender tax differential.

This paper investigates regulatory avoidance in the context of private country-by-country reporting (CbCR) introduced as part of the OECD/G20 BEPS initiative. The reporting framework requires multinational companies above a revenue threshold to provide tax authorities with new and detailed information on their global activities, but the data are not made publicly available. I find robust evidence for an increase in mass below the revenue threshold after the introduction of CbCR in line with an avoidance response. Company types for which CbCR would imply relatively high costs including private companies or more tax-aggressive firms show a stronger avoidance response. The heterogeneities found can at least partially be explained by an analysis of increases in tax costs. The finding of regulatory avoidance of multinational enterprises in response to a fixed revenue threshold is of additional relevance in light of the international tax reform agenda which relies on similar thresholds.

This paper explores the consequences of automation for public finance. We find that as the automation rate increases, the government size, measured as the fiscal revenues to output ratio, declines. This is due to the substitution of traditional inputs, which bear the burden of taxes, by the new automatic technology. These results are explained by the effects of automation on labor, where taxation of labor income (including social security contributions) represents the most important source of fiscal revenues in most advanced economies. The paper conducts two additional counterfactual experiments. First, we calculate how individual tax rates should be changed in response to automation in order to maintain constant fiscal revenues from the different sources of taxes. This experiment reveals that this fiscal policy would have significantly detrimental effects on output and labor, and indicates that a comprehensive reform of the current tax mix is necessary to counterbalance the effects of automation on public finance. Second, we calculate the tax rate on capital, without modifying the other tax rates, required to keep constant the size of the government, resulting in a capital income tax rate of around 0.77 for an automation rate of (45 %).

Growing foreign direct investments (FDIs) have been observed in parallel to the development of tax avoidance by multinational enterprises; however, empirical evidence indicates the asymmetric effects of trade costs on a firm’s entry decision. To give a new rationale and insights into the impacts of transfer pricing and trade liberalization on a firm’s global activities, this study incorporates transfer pricing and investigates a foreign firm’s entry decision: exports, greenfield FDI (GFDI), or cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CM&As). We show that CM&A is the equilibrium entry mode when transfer pricing regulation is loose, whereas the choice between exports and GFDI depends on the fixed costs of GFDI. Moreover, trade liberalization increases the likelihood of CM&A but decreases that of exports because a reduction in trade costs enhances tax-avoidance efficiency due to more intrafirm trade, implying that tax avoidance in the form of CM&A becomes crucial as globalization progresses. Our welfare analysis shows that regulating CM&A based on consumers’ benefits may result in welfare reduction because profit shifting is most effective under CM&A and a host country’s tax revenue from the foreign firm increases. The results imply the importance of considering the link between international tax and antitrust policies.

This paper studies to what extent mobility reductions and confinement measures impact value-added tax (VAT) collection, which is an increasingly important type of fiscal revenue around the world. Using evidence across twenty nations and over time, we measure these effects around the COVID-19 Pandemic. For that, we benefit from the novel IDB-CIAT monthly dataset on aggregate VAT revenues (2019–2020), combining it with both mobility-restriction policies and mobility outcomes. On average, monthly VAT revenues fell up to 30% around the event of the largest drop in mobility for each country. We also estimate mobility elasticities of VAT revenue. Mobility-restriction policies rising by 10% were associated with drops in VAT of 1.4%, while a 10% drop in actual mobility decreased VAT revenues by 3%. Furthermore, we show both elasticities were significantly smaller in the last quarter of 2020. Beyond the pandemic, results matter as a benchmark for fiscal and macroeconomic variables under large disruptions.

The digitalization of transaction processes through tools such as electronic invoicing (e-invoicing) aims to improve tax compliance and reduce administrative costs. Another important aspect of digitalization is its potential to reduce tax fraud. We exploit the comprehensive introduction of e-invoicing in Italy in 2019 and examine the effect of increased domestic tax enforcement capabilities on cross-border value-added tax (VAT) fraud. As a proxy for this fraud, we make use of the discrepancy in trade data that are double-reported in both the importing and exporting country (trade data gap, TDG). We calculate the TDG for imports to Italy from all other EU countries at the most detailed product level. Our results suggest a significant decline in cross-border fraud in response to the introduction of mandatory e-invoicing, providing an important rationale for the application of this measure by other countries. Furthermore, we estimate that e-invoicing decreased the Italian VAT loss in 2019 by about € 2.2 billion to € 2.6 billion compared to 2018. In this context, we underpin the suitability of the TDG as an approach for the study of anti-fraud measures.

This paper examines the mobility response of high-income households in the United States to a provision in a 2017 tax law that limited the federal deductibility of state and local taxes. The increase in the effective price of state and local taxes induced by the cap on deductibility caused high-income households to leave high-tax states in favor of low-tax states and to prefer low-tax states to high-tax states conditional on moving. The findings suggest that policymakers should take seriously the prospect that high-income taxpayers may flee states that tax them heavily, which could have long-lasting implications for states’ fiscal positions.

Abstract

The 2017 US tax legislation—widely referred to as the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA)—fundamentally transformed the US system of international taxation. It ostensibly ended worldwide taxation but introduced, for instance, a new tax on “Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income”. This paper surveys the emerging empirical literature on the impact of the TCJA’s international provisions. It documents five robust findings in this empirical literature. First, the TCJA led to a general decline in US MNCs’ foreign acquisitions. Second, the TCJA increased US MNCs’ investment in routine foreign tangible assets. Third, the reform did not lead to any change in profit shifting by US MNCs beyond the magnitude that would be expected based on the TCJA’s tax rate reduction. Fourth, The TCJA appears to have reduced the market value of US MNCs relative to domestic US firms. Fifth, the TCJA does not appear to have had any detectable impact on domestic US investment and wages (although there are some contrary results for capital expenditures). The welfare implications of these findings depend crucially on whether US MNCs’ are viewed as having engaged in too much or too little foreign activity prior to the TCJA. This depends on the choice of theoretical framework and the relevant normative benchmark, and cannot readily be resolved empirically.

There is virtually no evidence on the role of taxpayer education to improve tax compliance. We address this gap by providing the first evaluation of a taxpayer education program on compliance behavior, as well as taxpayer knowledge and perceptions. Using a unique dataset of administrative and survey data, we show that training new taxpayers leads to a large and significant improvement on three compliance outcomes: the probability to file declarations, to report a zero-tax amount, and tax due. These results are robust to three estimation strategies: a simple regression exploiting baseline balance across a wide set of observable variables, propensity score matching, and an IV strategy using random assignment to take part in our survey. We identify reduced compliance costs as the key mechanism at play in explaining the relationship between tax education and compliance—particularly increased knowledge and better perceptions on complexity. The effects we document persist over time, beyond the year of implementation.

I characterize the optimal linear commodity taxes when households differ in multiple characteristics and earn multiple incomes, in presence of an optimal non-linear tax schedule on the taxpayers’ labour incomes. The government should tax a commodity more heavily if, conditional on labour income, more deserving taxpayers consume larger quantities of that commodity. Furthermore, the government wishes to tax commodities at different rates to the extent that doing so reduces the distortions caused by the labour income tax. This is the case when households with different incomes have different consumption preferences, or when households with different labour supplies also have different consumption patterns.