Taxes in an e-commerce generation

Rapid growth in e-commerce has altered the ability of jurisdictions to enforce commodity taxes on a destination basis. This results in different effective tax rates depending on the way in which goods and services are purchased and the characteristics of both the products and the sellers. We discuss the arguments for the destination principle as the appropriate place-of-taxation rule for consumption taxation of cross-border trade. We analyze various recent reforms to the value-added tax in the European Union in response to e-commerce. We then examine various policy options in the USA—maintaining the status quo, changing nexus rules, states adopting information reporting, and national reforms that require firms to remit taxes regardless of physical presence—and relate them to the recent European reforms. We conclude based on our analysis and the recent European Union experience that reforms at the national level appear to be the important next step to enforcing commodity taxes at destination in the USA.     

The Marginal Cost of Public Funds in Closed and Small Open Economies

The efficiency cost of taxation has become an increasingly important consideration in the evaluation of alternative tax policy options. This paper provides a review of estimates of the efficiency costs of taxation and presents some new estimates for small open economies. The available studies suggest that, in closed economies, the distortions from taxation are highest for corporate taxes and lowest for wage taxes. This efficiency ranking of different taxes does not hold in small open economies. It is shown that, in a small open economy, this ranking is reversed. Personal income taxes are less distortionary than wage taxes primarily because the link between domestic saving and investment is severed. Corporate taxes are also less distortionary for a variety of factors, such as changes in depreciation levels, payments to foreigners and terms of trade.     

Corporate and personal income tax declarations

Decisions by firms and individuals on the extent of their tax payments have generally been treated as separate choices. Empirically, a positive relationship between corporate and personal income tax evasion can be observed. The theoretical analysis in this paper shows that a manager's decision on the firm's behaviour will be independent of his personal preferences if the gain from reducing corporate tax payments is certain, as in the case of tax avoidance. If, however, the firm evades taxes so that the manager's income depends on whether the firm's activities are detected or not, corporate and personal income tax evasion choices cannot be separated. Jel Code H 24 · H 25 · H 26     

Theft and taxes

This paper analyzes the interaction between corporate taxes and corporate governance. We show that the design of the corporate tax system affects the amount of private benefits extracted by company insiders and that the quality of the corporate governance system affects the sensitivity of tax revenues to tax changes. Analyses of a tax enforcement crackdown in Russia and cross-country data on tax changes support this two-way interaction between corporate governance and corporate taxation.     

Taxes and the global allocation of capital

Despite enormous growth in international capital flows, capital-output ratios continue to exhibit substantial heterogeneity across countries. We explore the possibility that taxes, particularly corporate taxes, are a significant source of this heterogeneity. The evidence is mixed. Tax rates computed from tax revenue are inversely correlated with capital-output ratios, as we might expect. However, effective tax rates constructed from official tax rates show little relation to capital—or to revenue-based tax measures. The stark difference between these two tax measures remains an open issue.     

How Should Business Profit Be Taxed? Some Thoughts on Conceptual Developments During the Lifetime of the IFS*

This paper reviews developments since the 1970s in economic thinking about the design of taxes on business profit. It charts developments from proposals for a cash flow tax from the Meade Committee, to refinements of this in the form of an ‘Allowance for Corporate Equity’ and the levying of the cash flow tax in the country of destination. It describes how the development of international trade and investment has led to ever‐increasing problems in the international tax system with respect to economic efficiency, profit shifting, complexity and tax competition. It also identifies why a response to these problems requires a major reform in the location of taxation.     

Taxes, Leverage, and the Cost of Equity Capital

We examine the associations among leverage, corporate and investor level taxes, and the firm's implied cost of equity capital. Expanding on Modigliani and Miller [1958, 1963] , the cost of equity capital can be expressed as a function of leverage and corporate and investor level taxes. Based on this expression, we predict that the cost of equity is increasing in leverage, and that corporate taxes mitigate this leverage‐related risk premium, while the personal tax disadvantage of debt increases this premium. We empirically test these predictions using implied cost of equity estimates and proxies for the firm's corporate tax rate and the personal tax disadvantage of debt. Our results suggest that the equity risk premium associated with leverage is decreasing in the corporate tax benefit from debt. We find some evidence that the equity risk premium from leverage is increasing in the personal tax penalty associated with debt.     

Sharing Risk with the Government: How Taxes Affect Corporate Risk Taking

Using 113 staggered changes in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states, we provide evidence on how taxes affect corporate risk‐taking decisions. Higher taxes reduce expected profits more for risky projects than for safe ones, as the government shares in a firm's upside but not in its downside. Consistent with this prediction, we find that risk taking is sensitive to taxes, albeit asymmetrically: the average firm reduces risk in response to a tax increase (primarily by changing its operating cycle and reducing R&D risk) but does not respond to a tax cut. We trace the asymmetry back to constraints on risk taking imposed by creditors. Finally, tax loss‐offset rules moderate firms’ sensitivity to taxes by allowing firms to partly share downside risk with the government.     

Real Effects of Accounting Rules: Evidence from Multinational Firms’ Investment Location and Profit Repatriation Decisions

We analyze survey responses from nearly 600 tax executives to better understand corporate decisions about real investment location and profit repatriation. Our evidence indicates that avoiding financial accounting income tax expense is as important as avoiding cash income taxes when corporations decide where to locate operations and whether to repatriate foreign earnings. This result is important in light of the recent research about whether financial accounting affects investment and in light of the decades of research on foreign investment that examines the role of cash income taxes but heretofore has not investigated the importance of financial reporting effects. Our analysis suggests that financial reporting is an important factor to be considered in the policy debates focused on bringing investment to the United States.     

The effectiveness and valuation of political tax minimization

We find evidence suggesting that corporate lobbying for tax purposes over the period 1999–2009 is one method by which firms managed corporate taxes. Furthermore, tax management strategies employed by these politically active firms were valued by shareholders. Firms lobbying on tax issues have lower book effective taxes and greater discretionary permanent differences in GAAP and IRS taxable income. Investors place a premium on lobbying activities for tax purposes unless the firm already has a low effective tax rate or very high book-tax differences. We conclude that lobbying political officials is one method by which firms manage risks attendant an aggressive tax strategy.     

Barriers to Trade and Imperfect Competition: The Choice of Commodity Tax Base

Recent work has started to analyze the choice of international commodity tax base under conditions of imperfect competition. This paper focuses on the effects of changing levels of trade barriers in a model where firms engage in duopoly competition and governments set commodity taxes non-cooperatively. It is shown that the consumption base (destination principle) dominates the production base (origin principle) when trade costs are high, but the ranking of the two tax bases is reversed for low levels of trade costs. We conclude that the case for origin-based commodity taxes becomes stronger when barriers to trade fall.     

The effects of tax policy on financial markets: G3 evidence

We investigate the effects of various tax policy innovations on stock market returns. By using a vector autoregressive model that controls for the mutual causality between fiscal policy and financial market performance, we test whether financial markets serve as a transmission mechanism for tax policy innovations. Our findings indicate that indirect taxes have a larger effect on market returns than do labor taxes. Further, corporate tax innovations do not have any statistically significant effect on stock returns. We consider that this finding is a result of a firm's ability to switch between equity financing and bond financing.     

Tax morale and public spending inefficiency

Tax evasion is a widespread phenomenon and encouraging tax compliance is an important and debated policy issue. Many studies have shown that tax cheating has to be attributed to a considerable extent to the tax morale of taxpayers. The aim of the present paper is to shed light on the relationship between the taxpayer and the public sector; specifically, we investigate whether public spending inefficiency shapes individual tax morale. Combining data from Italian municipalities’ balance sheets with individual data from a properly designed survey on tax morale, we find that the attitude towards paying taxes is better when resources are spent more efficiently. This evidence seems not to be driven by some confounding factor at the municipality level or by spatial sorting of citizens and proves robust to accounting for alternative measures of both inefficiency and tax morale. We also find that the negative effect of inefficiency is larger if the level of public spending is lower and/or the degree of fiscal autonomy is higher.     

Tax Incentives for Extraction and Recycling of Basic Materials in Canada

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the overall incentives generated by taxes with respect to the choice between extraction and recycling of basic materials in Canada. We calculate measures of the overall impact of the Canadian tax system on the incremental cost of (i) producing virgin material or recycled material that is to be used as an intermediate input in the production of a final product and (ii) producing finished products. The sectors that we examine include producers of primary virgin material (forestry, mining, oil and gas), producers of recycled material (scrap dealers) and producers of finished products (metal, paper, plastic and glass). Our results indicate that the Canadian tax system significantly favours the use of virgin materials rather than recycled materials in the case of metal and glass products, but the reverse is true for plastic products. Features in the Canadian tax system contributing to these findings are not limited to corporate income and mining tax incentives at the exploration and extraction stages of the production of virgin materials, but also include provincial sales taxes on capital, which are borne more heavily by scrap firms than by resource and manufacturing firms, and provincial sales taxes that apply to business inputs, which also fall more heavily upon the recycling sector.     

Response of Tax Credit Claims to Tax Enforcement: Evidence from a Quasi‐Experiment in Chile

Diesel in Chile receives different tax treatments depending on its use. If diesel is used in industrial activities, the diesel taxes paid can be fully used as a credit against VAT, but if it is used in freight or public transportation – basically trucks and buses – only a fraction of diesel taxes paid can be claimed as a tax credit for VAT payments. As a result of this different tax treatment, firms have incentives to use ‘tax‐exempted’ diesel in activities requiring ‘non‐tax‐exempted’ diesel. This tax wedge therefore generates an opportunity for tax evasion, especially for firms with multiple economic activities, one of them being transport. In this paper, we analyse the impact of a tax enforcement programme implemented by the Chilean Internal Revenue Service (IRS), where letters requiring information about diesel purchases and use and vehicle ownership were sent to around 200 firms in 2003. Using different empirical strategies to consider the non‐randomness of the selection of firms, the empirical results show consistently that firms receiving a letter decreased their diesel tax credits by around 10 per cent.     

Tariff evasion in sub-Saharan Africa: the influence of corruption in importing and exporting countries

Multilateral organizations recommend sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries to increase international trade in order to attain sustainable economic growth. The benefits of trade can be hampered, however, by tariff evasion. Using trade data from 2008–2014 of 31 SSA countries, we examine how the association between tariff rates and value and quantity gaps (which are indicative of tariff evasion) is enhanced by corruption in both importing and exporting countries (SSA countries are referred to as importing countries, and their trade partners from outside SSA are referred to as exporting countries). Results of a series of tests show that corruption levels in both sides of the trade partnership reinforce the (positive) association between tariff rates and value and quantity gaps. This indicates that counteracting tariff evasion in SSA is a co-responsibility between trade partners.     

Arguments in Favour of Tax Neutral Cost Allocation

When considering corporate taxes in a cost allocation context a trade‐off is generated for shareholders. On the one hand, accelerated depreciation increases the value of a project due to the depreciation tax shield. On the other hand, accelerated depreciation most likely does not induce robust goal congruency between managers and shareholders when utilizing residual income as an incentive system and, as a consequence, over‐ or underinvestment could result. In this context, the literature suggests the application of particular allocation rules. When extending the relative marginal benefits cost allocation rule (Reichelstein, 1997; Rogerson, 1997) to include corporate taxes we find it to be tax neutral and to maintain its properties of generating robust incentives. As a consequence the over‐/underinvestment problem is solved, but the depreciation tax shield is often not maximized. However, we illustrate that in competitive markets shareholders ought to prefer a tax neutral allocation scheme over an accelerated depreciation schedule. Thus, we show that shareholders as well as regulators have—for different reasons—a preference for tax neutral cost allocation.     

Corporate tax,capital structure,and the accessibility of bank loans: Evidence from China

In this paper, we investigate whether listed firms in China adjust their capital structure in response to an increase in the corporate tax rate. Although theories of capital structure suggest that corporate tax is an important determinant of capital structure, how exogenous changes of the tax rate affect firms’ leverage decisions has not been fully explored. We examine a unique circumstance in which the Chinese government increased the corporate tax rate of firms that had previously received local government tax rebates. The evidence indicates that these firms increased their leverage when the corporate tax rate increased. Further investigation suggests that the adjustment of leverage was mostly driven by firms with a high level of access to bank loans.     

The capitalization of taxes in bond prices: Evidence from the market for Government of Canada bonds

This paper provides estimates of the extent to which corporate and personal income taxes are capitalized in bond prices. The methodology yields estimates of the degree of tax capitalization, rather than an implied tax rate. This makes it straightforward to identify the marginal investor and test for changes in tax capitalization. The empirical approach also makes it unnecessary to jointly estimate the degree of tax capitalization and the entire yield curve. Corporate taxes are found to have been fully capitalized in pre-tax Government of Canada bond yields during the period 1986–1993. Since 1994, taxes have not been capitalized in yields. These results are consistent with the existence of a marginal investor, but the identity of the marginal investor changed from a financial sector firm to a non-taxed entity in the early 1990s.     

Collusive tax evasion and social norms

Although collusive tax evasion by buyers and sellers of commodities and also by employers and employees is widespread all over the world, it has rarely been analyzed in the tax evasion literature. To fill this gap and to compare collusive tax evasion with independent tax evasion, this paper develops a simple noncooperative game-theoretic model and confirms the model’s predictions in a laboratory experiment. Because collusive tax evasion involves social interaction, this paper focuses on the effect of social norms and theoretically and empirically demonstrates that the tax compliance norm has a stronger negative effect on the magnitude of collusive tax evasion than on independent tax evasion. The reason for this result is that in a collusive tax evasion game with multiple equilibria social norms affect the range of equilibria and act as an equilibrium selection device, whereas social norms need to be strongly internalized to change the behavior of taxpayers who evade taxes unobservedly.