International Tax and Public Finance最新文献

We discuss corporate tax effects on multinationals’ R&D. Theoretically, we find that a host country’s tax increase may boost local R&D expenditure: while R&D becomes deductible at a higher rate, this higher rate may not apply to all R&D returns. First, as R&D creates a public good within the MNE, some R&D returns are taxed at other countries’ tax rates. Second, some of the R&D returns are taxed at a lower IP regime tax rate. The positive tax rate effect is empirically supported by country-by-country R&D data of U.S.-owned subsidiaries for countries that have an IP regime.

What is the role of income polarization for explaining differentials in public funding of education? To answer this question, we provide a new theoretical modelling for the income distribution that can directly monitor income polarization. It leads to a new income polarization index where the middle class is represented by an interval. We implement this distribution in a political economy model with endogenous fertility and public/private educational choices. We show that when households vote on public schooling expenditures, polarization matters for explaining disparities in public education funding across communities. Using micro-data covering two groups of school districts, we find that both income polarization and income inequality affect public school funding with opposite signs whether there exist a Tax Limitation Expenditure (TLE) or not.

We examine the effects of stationary nonlinear labor income tax rules in a dynamic economy, considering extensive marginal labor-leisure choices and uninsured idiosyncratic shocks on labor productivity and labor disutility. The labor income tax rule has significant implications for households’ savings behavior and asset distribution over the long-run. We derive a optimal stationary tax rules as a natural extension of optimal participation tax rule in the static models. Through numerical simulations, two main findings emerge: (i) The current optimal tax rule, aimed at maximizing welfare based on the present asset distribution level, supports in-work benefits for low-income workers as a static extensive margin model. While this policy temporarily enhances welfare, it leads to a decline in capital accumulation and a decrease in average utility flow over time. (ii) The long-run optimal tax rule, optimizing welfare when the asset distribution reaches a stationary state, exhibits less progressivity and initially worsens welfare temporarily. However, it eventually improves the average utility flow in the long-run. The long-term consequences of households’ saving behavior and asset distribution mitigate the attractiveness of in-work benefit policies. By shedding light on the trade-offs between short-term welfare gains and long-term utility improvements, this study provides insights into designing effective labor income tax policies in a dynamic economic context.

We use information from the electronic billing system to estimate the underreporting of income of private sector employees. We follow an expenditure-based methodology using the consumption of public and private sector employees for similar levels of reported income. We find that private sector employees underreport between 7 and 9% of their income in Ecuador. The size of the underreporting gap is negatively correlated with the number of employees at the firm, consistent with different risks and administrative costs of ‘envelope wages’ in small versus large firms.

Many tax authorities changed the mode of interacting with taxpayers from physical to online as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic. We study the effect of the e-tax-filing in Eswatini, using a difference-in-difference and propensity score methods that exploit the limited take-up of e-tax filing. We present three sets of results. First, larger and more IT-sophisticated firms are more likely to adopt e-Tax. Second, after adoption, e-Tax has mixed results on filing behavior and reporting accuracy. Third, companies remit less tax after adoption e-tax-filing.

This paper examines the price effects of a VAT (value-added tax) reduction for menstrual hygiene products in Germany. Several aspects make this VAT reduction particularly interesting: the reduction is exogenous to economic conditions, the reduction was substantial and permanent, and demand can be assumed to be inelastic. We find that the VAT reduction was completely passed through to consumers. In fact, pass-through rates of significantly more than 100% can be observed. We find that the excess pass-through occurred in relatively competitive market segments, and that it is almost fully explained by retailers rounding down prices after the reduction.

Employing a two-period model with an environmental externality, this paper investigates the relation between emission taxation and the optimal level of public debt. The central insight is that the effect of emission taxation on optimal borrowing is ambiguous and may lead to lower or higher optimal debt. In the context of climate change, we even show that the counterintuitive result of a higher optimal debt level is likely in the short-run and possibly also in the long-run, a result that provides a novel rationale for public borrowing. Our basic arguments turn out to be robust against several generalization.

Portugal introduced a sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB) tax in 2017. This study uses unique administrative accounting data for all SSB producers/importers in Portugal, and an event study design with bottled water firms as the primary comparison group, to assess the causal impacts of the tax on multiple firm-level outcomes. We find a 6.8% average decrease in domestic SSB sales, relative to bottled water. The soda tax hindered SSB firms’ financial health, namely net income, ability to convert receivables into cash, and liabilities. SSB producers/importers did not decrease wages, cut jobs, or modify their workforce toward higher R&D capacity. Forgone corporate income tax appears negligible compared to the government revenue generated by the tax itself.