International Tax and Public Finance最新文献

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.

This paper offers a comprehensive and updated review of the effects of intergovernmental grants. We focus on the main findings in the existing literature on the effects of intergovernmental grants on tax policy and choices, expenditure decisions, fiscal stability and behavioral choices, and political economy. The intricate nature of the subject, intrinsically, does not allow for an all-inclusive survey, but we aim to provide a thorough examination and update of the most salient effects of intergovernmental grants, while indicating areas for further research.

We study the price effects of a temporary VAT reduction in Germany using a web-scraped dataset of daily prices of more than 60000 supermarket products. For causal identification, we compare the development of German prices to those in Austria. We find that the reduction of VAT rates led to a price decrease of 1.3%, implying that 70% of the tax cut were passed on to consumers. Moreover, the pass-through is higher for vertically integrated products (private label) than for independent brands. This is consistent with menu cost theories and theories predicting that price markups act as a buffer for cost shocks.

The paper uses an OLG model to study the interaction between policies designed to ensure the sustainability of the pension system, i.e. child allowances and pensions policies, and grandparental childcare. We find that the rise in grandparenting negatively affects the elderly labour supply hampering the impact of pension policies designed to raise the retirement age and lengthen working lives. Then, we introduce child allowances and find that the impact of child allowances on the fertility rate is influenced by the efficiency of grandparenting in reducing child-rearing costs. Child benefits have a positive impact on fertility only if grandparenting is not very effective at reducing childcare costs. This suggests that the role of grandparents in various countries may partly explain the inconsistency in empirical evidence on the relationship between child benefits and fertility rates. The study also finds that child benefits have a positive impact on the elderly labour supply when grandparenting is efficient.

In this paper, we analyse a sample of voluntarily published country-by-country reports (CbCRs) of 35 multinational enterprises (MNEs). We assess the value added and the limitations of qualitative and quantitative information provided in the reports based on a comparison to individual MNEs’ annual financial reports and aggregate CbCR data provided by the OECD. In terms of data quality, we find that the inclusion of intra-company dividends and equity-accounted profits are a minor concern on average but that for individual MNEs corrections might be substantial. Our sample MNEs seem to pay higher effective tax rates than the global average and many of them report relatively little profit in tax havens. We only find a very weak correlation of the location of profits and effective tax rates. This might indicate that more tax transparent MNEs avoid taxes less aggressively. However, our assessment of different tax risk indicators reveals important variations between companies.