Under-reporting of Income and Labor Market Performance

To examine the effects on labor market performance of government tax and enforcement policies, this paper develops an equilibrium model featuring tax evasion, matching frictions, and worker–firm wage bargains. In the wage bargains, workers and firms can agree on the amount of remuneration that should not be reported to the tax authorities. We find that increased taxation actually reduces unemployment, whereas more zealous enforcement has the opposite effect.     

A quantitative theory of tax evasion

I present a simple, unified approach to study the tax evasion practices often observed in developing countries. I develop a general equilibrium model where heterogeneous establishments optimally select themselves into informality, tax compliance, and formal tax evasion. Informal firms evade taxes by staying small, while larger, formal firms can engage in costly tax evasion. In equilibrium, tax revenues rely on medium-sized firms, which are scarce. In a calibration exercise using data from Mexico, I find that reducing the returns to tax evasion by formal firms increases tax revenues by up to 68%. However, economies where such returns are too high face a trade-off between tax collection and aggregate efficiency, as cracking down on formal tax-evading firms pushes some firms into informality. Last, as the economy develops, the informal sector shrinks, while the tax-evading sector expands, thus limiting potential collection. If lower informality is a byproduct of development, and not vice versa, a solid tax base can be achieved by fiscal authorities effectively by focusing on formal tax evasion.     

Dynamic analysis of bribery firms’ environmental tax evasion in an emissions trading market

Using an R&D-based growth model with dual regulation, we analyse how environmental policies influence pollution, corruption, a growth rate, and welfare. Considering that polluting firms bribe bureaucrats to evade paying environmental tax, we find that a stricter environmental tax leads to a decrease in growth rate via a decrease in the permit rent as well as an increase in pollution and corruption per firm and results in worsening households’ welfare and in improving the bureaucrats’ welfare. Thus, tax evasion with corruption improves households’ welfare and worsens the bureaucrats’ welfare. Our findings imply that tax evasion under dual regulation improves social welfare.     

Tax evasion policies and the demand for cash

This paper analyzes the relationship between tax evasion and the demand for cash by studying the effects of two measures to fight evasion: accessing taxpayers’ bank data and imposing thresholds for cash payments. We study the effects of these policies in Italy, where visibility of bank data and cash thresholds were recently increased. We show that both significantly affected cash holdings, which grew by about 1.5 percent of the GDP. Using unique high frequency data on cash operations and exploiting regional heterogeneity in tax evasion propensity, we find that accessing bank data pushes regions with higher propensity to evade taxes to convert more deposits into cash. On the contrary, higher cash thresholds do not increase cash holdings more in these regions. We rationalize the findings with a simple model of tax evasion and payment choices, where cash and deposits have different degrees of privacy.     

A note on progression,penalty schemes and tax evasion

This note deals with the question of whether shifting the tax base towards more progression will stimulate or discourage tax evasion, when the tax base is shifted so that either the expected tax revenues of government or the expected utility of taxpayer will remain unchanged. The answer turns out to depend sensitively on the nature of penalty schemes if caught in tax evasion. If the penalty rate is charged on the undeclared income, tax evasion will increase, while if the penalty rate is charged on the evaded tax, tax evasion will decrease when the tax base is shifted towards progression.     

The Determinants of Location Choices of China's ODI: Institutions,Taxation and Resources

China has become the third largest source of outward direct investment (ODI). This paper studies how institutions in the host countries affect the location choices of China’s ODI. Based on a deal-level sample from 2002–2011, this paper empirically tests how political institutions, political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law and contrd of corruption in the host countries affect the location choices of China’s ODI. On top of these institutional factors, we study the effects of tax evasion and natural resources in host countries, and their interactions with institutional factors. We find that political institutions in the host countries are not major concerns of the ODI, while government effectiveness, regulatory quality, and control of corruption have significant effects on the locations of ODI. In addition, China’s ODI tends to avoid countries with strict legal systems. Tax evasion and resources are also major motives of China’s ODI. General institutional quality and tax evasion are substitutes in China’s ODI location decisions.     

Wage endogeneity,tax evasion,and optimal nonlinear income taxation

This paper studies the interaction between tax evasion and wage endogeneity within a Mirrleesian optimal tax framework. It characterizes the optimal marginal income tax rates on the skilled and the unskilled workers and the optimal amount of resources to be spent on deterring tax evasion. It shows that tax evasion weakens the incentives for the government to manipulate the marginal tax rates for the purpose of exploiting general equilibrium effects on wages. Moreover, the extent of this depends on the curvature of the evasion cost function. It also argues that marginal income tax rates are likely to be higher when the government attempts to deter evasion.     

The Political Economy of the (Weak) Enforcement of Indirect Taxes

The objective of this paper is to understand the determinants of the enforcement level of indirect taxation in a positive setting. We build a sequential game where individuals, who differ in their willingness to pay for a taxed good, vote over the enforcement level. Firms then compete à la Cournot and choose the fraction of sales taxes to evade. We assume in most of the paper that the tax rate is set exogenously. Voters face the following trade‐off: more enforcement not only increases tax collection but also increases the consumer price of the goods sold in an imperfectly competitive market. We obtain that the equilibrium enforcement level is the one most preferred by the individual with the median willingness to pay, that it is not affected by the structure of the market (number of firms) and the firms’ marginal cost, and that it decreases with the resource cost of evasion and with the tax rate. We also compare the enforcement level chosen by majority voting with the utilitarian level. In the last section, we endogenize the tax rate by assuming that individuals vote simultaneously over tax rate and enforcement level. We prove the existence of a Condorcet winner and show that it entails full enforcement (i.e., no tax evasion at equilibrium). The existence of markets with less than full enforcement then depends crucially on the fact that tax rates are not tailored to each market individually.     

Intergenerational Allocation of Government Expenditures: Externalities and Optimal Taxation

This paper studies optimal capital and labor income taxes when the benefits of public goods are age‐dependent. Provided the government can impose a consumption tax, it can attain the first‐best resource allocation. This involves the uniform taxation of the cohorts' labor income and a zero capital income tax. With no consumption tax and optimally chosen government spending, labor income should be taxed nonuniformly across cohorts and the capital income tax should be nonzero. Deviations of the public goods from their respective optima create distortions. These affect the labor supply decisions of both cohorts and capital accumulation, providing a further reason to tax (or subsidize) capital income.     

Corporate tax evasion: The case for specialists

We analyze the role of accounting specialists who help corporations evade/avoid taxes in a game of incomplete information played by a tax authority, corporate taxpayers, and an accounting specialist. In addition to a full equilibrium characterization, we establish that (i) marginal changes in enforcement are not effective when evasion/avoidance is pervasive; (ii) fines on firms as opposed to specialists are more effective in such situations; (iii) reducing auditing costs and increasing “creative accounting” costs are effective in curbing evasion when tax compliance is relatively high.     

Household tax evasion

Household members share public goods and make intra-household transfers. We show how these features of the household interact with the tax evasion decision, and identify the dimensions in which household evasion differs from individual evasion. In the model we present two members of a household choose how much to contribute to a household public good and how much self-employment income to evade. We are interested in how different evasion possibilities interact with the contribution decisions to the household public good and the role of income transfers within the household. We show the household evasion decision differs from the individual decision because it affects the outcome of the household contribution game. When household members are taxed as individuals neutrality applies when choices are not constrained. If the evasion level of one household member is constrained then an income transfer can generate a Pareto improvement. When the household members are jointly taxed there is a couple constraint on strategies and corner solutions can emerge.     

Separating small and big fish: The case of income tax evasion

This paper proposes to offer the taxpayer a choice of tax-enforcement schemes for self-selection. More specifically, the taxpayer should have the possibility of opting for the prevailing regime with a certain penalty on the evaded tax or for an alternative regime with a higher penalty on the evaded tax but a reduced tax rate. It is shown that this leads to a separation of taxpayers characterized by a relatively high degree of evasion (H-evaders) from taxpayers who evade only a relatively small amount of tax (L-evaders). Furthermore, the procedure is not self-defeating, it is effectively possible to direct the efforts of auditing towards the H-evaders. At the end of the game the L-evaders experience a welfare gain, the H-evaders are induced to reduce their evasion activities and the government can expect higher yields.We wish to thank Johann K. Brunner and two anonymous referees for many helpful comments.     

Jointly Optimal Taxes and Enforcement Policies in Response to Tax Evasion

Assuming the government cannot fully observe either individual types or incomes and jointly picks optimal taxes and audit policies against evasion can significantly alter standard results from optimal income taxation and tax‐evasion models, which treat these separately. We consider this when individuals differ in their risk preferences and incomes. Given the resulting complexity, supplementing analytic results with numerical analysis helps explain the structure of the resulting policies and how they change when the distribution of income or the revenue requirements of the government change. We do this analysis with and without audit errors and with incomes exogenous or affected by occupational choice.     

Inter‐Jurisdictional Competition for Firms*

Regions inhabited with an immobile population of disabled and able individuals compete to attract mobile firms that provide jobs. The redistributive goal of regional governments is to support the disabled, who cannot work. Able individuals may work, be involuntary unemployed because of frictions in the labor market, or choose to be voluntary unemployed. Labor force participation decisions depend on regional redistributive policies. Both the size of workforce and tax on firms affect profits and therefore, firms’ location decisions. Allowing regions to engage in tax competition may be efficient. If regions cannot tax firms, they compete by implementing inefficient redistributive policies.     

Environmental Taxation,Inequality and Engel’s Law: The Double Dividend of Redistribution

Empirical evidence shows that low-income households spend a high share of their income on pollution-intensive goods. This fuels the concern that an environmental tax reform could be regressive. We employ a framework which accounts for the distributional effect of environmental taxes and the recycling of the revenues on both households and firms to quantify changes in the optimal tax structure and the equity impacts of an environmental tax reform. We characterize when an optimal environmental tax reform does not increase inequality, even if the tax system before the reform is optimal from a non-environmental point of view. If the tax system before the reform is calibrated to stylized data—and is thus non-optimal—we find that there is a large scope for inequality reduction, even if the government is restricted in its recycling options.     

Tax Evasion,Corruption and Market Entry

We analyze the impact of tax policy on the market entry of firms in the presence of corruption and tax evasion. In a world with corruption, firms must bribe corrupt officials to enter the market. For a given level of bribes, higher tax rates and stricter enforcement of taxation decrease tax evasion but typically reduce market entry. However, when the level of bribes reacts to tax policy, higher taxes and stricter enforcement of taxation can have a double benefit. Up to a certain threshold, for which we develop a simple rule, stricter enforcement increases market entry and reduces tax evasion.     

Social norms and economic growth in a model with labor and capital income tax evasion

Empirical evidence suggests that low-income countries are characterized by high levels of labor and capital income tax evasion while the opposite is true for high-income countries. This paper proposes a model to study the relationship between economic growth and both types of income tax evasion. We show that the existence of a social norm towards tax compliance generates a complementarity between capital and labor income tax evasion which explains the decline of both the share of evaders in the population and the amount of tax evasion when countries accumulate capital. The model predicts that the level of tax morale is positively correlated with both types of income tax evasion and the level of income per capita, consistent with recent empirical evidence. Finally, a higher tax rate increases the share of evaders in the population and aggregate tax evasion.     

Tax evasion and labor markets

Concern with revenue losses, inequities, and inefficiency that may result from tax evasion has produced a number of formal analyses of taxpayer dishonesty. Most of this work has concentrated on the behavior of individual evaders and has ignored the interaction between evasion and labor market equilibrium. To remedy this, our analysis uses a model with two labor markets — which differ in the potential for evasion — to examine how changes in various tax parameters affect evasion and labor market equilibrium. We also simulate the effect of switching from a proportional to a progressive tax system in order to evaluate the well-known claim that progressivity encourages evasion.     

A theory of mutual migration of polluting firms

Abstract.  Suppose that governments care about their tax revenue and local firms have some say in environmental regulations. Then, the level of employment and environmental compliance may be negotiated. We find that firms located in different countries can improve their threat‐point payoffs by mutual migration. This in turn affects the negotiated output/employment and environmental regulations, which causes profits to increase if the firm's threat‐point payoff is higher than that of the local government. The model predicts that pollution‐intensive firms or firms with highly inelastic demands are more likely to move out. Increases in the government's valuation of the environment, or in the degree of globalization also cause mutual migration of dirty firms. The effect of a government caring about consumer surplus leads to a lower pollution tax, reducing firms' incentives to move out. JEL classification: F2, Q0