Weekly summaries of recent studies and posts relevant for our work

Brought to you by Matt and Claude Code

📅 April 14, 2026

Multinational Taxation/trade

• Tariffs on imported vehicles alone boost US producer surplus by $1 billion, but extending tariffs to imported parts reverses these gains, cutting US-headquartered firms’ surplus by $2.6 billion as domestic assemblers dependent on foreign inputs see their costs rise. [NBER WP 35023 | PDF]

Tax Evasion & Administration

• A Finnish RCT using novel third-party information on apartment ownership increased rental income reporting by over 30% among previously non-reporting landlords, with enforcement letters generating positive spillovers within co-ownership networks that amplified the total impact by 14%. [AEJ | PDF]
• Reconstructing Peruvian national accounts from 1942 to 2022, this study finds that Peru established one of the world’s most regressive tax systems, with wage-productivity decoupling and rising exploitation rates accelerating sharply during neoliberal policy phases since the 1990s. [WIL WP 2026/07 | PDF]
• A new framework for point-identifying tax compliance rates finds that taxes were paid on roughly zero to 1.6% of Airbnb transactions before platform collection agreements, costing treated jurisdictions an average of $1.8 million per year in lost revenue. [AEJ | PDF]
• A Quebec tax reform shows that workers at small firms bear 35% of the corporate tax burden, with gains distributed across all earnings terciles rather than concentrated at the top—consistent with fair-wage concerns in close-knit small business environments. [AEJ | PDF]
• Digitizing land records in Punjab, Pakistan reduced tax collection by 47%—not because the tax base shrank, but because bureaucrats lost both bribe income and leverage over taxpayers, demonstrating how partial digitization can undermine state capacity through organizational spillovers. [AER | PDF]

Illicit Financial Flows & Real Estate

• A discrete choice experiment with 334 Norwegian AML professionals shows that non-transparent beneficial ownership increases suspicious transaction reporting odds by only half as much as unknown origin of funds, suggesting hidden ownership receives insufficient priority despite being a primary money laundering red flag. [Int. Rev. Law Econ. | PDF]
• UK retail relief reduced commercial vacancy rates by roughly 80% for eligible properties, while small business rate relief boosted small-business occupancy by 51%—though cost-benefit analysis shows net benefits are negative absent spillover effects from filling vacancies. [AEJ | PDF]

Tax & Environment

• A heterogeneous-country model calibrated to 134 economies shows that poorer countries gain more from a global carbon tax because they suffer larger relative climate damages, generating an income gradient in willingness to accept climate action that rich countries’ opposition cannot be overcome by simple revenue redistribution.[LIDAM/IRES DP 2026/06 | PDF]

Wealth Taxation

• Microsimulation across 18 EU countries finds that net wealth taxes are the most progressive and redistributive, while taxes on financial and investment property wealth better target rent-seeking—but trade-offs between redistribution, extreme wealth eradication, and emissions reduction mean no single wealth tax design achieves all post-growth goals.[PDF]

Other Tax

• Extending Slavík and Yazici’s dynamic taxation framework, this paper shows that it becomes optimal to tax AI once cognitive workers start considering switching to manual jobs—a threshold that may soon be crossed as AI increasingly substitutes for human cognitive tasks.[PDF]
• A Japanese survey finds an inverted U-shaped relationship between sleep duration and willingness to accept higher tax rates for redistribution, with optimal sleep producing the highest allowable tax rate, especially among high-income respondents. [PDF]
• Distributed microdata from 19 OECD countries show that R&D tax incentives are far less effective for large, R&D-intensive firms—essentially zero elasticity—while SMEs respond strongly, reconciling the gap between firm-level studies (elasticities of -1.5 to -4) and aggregate estimates (-0.5) through limited uptake and firm-size heterogeneity.[AEJ | PDF]

Methods

• Analyzing 44,000 economics papers, Goldsmith-Pinkham finds that finance and macro lag applied micro by 15 years in adopting credibility revolution methods, with growth outside applied micro driven overwhelmingly by difference-in-differences while IV, RD, and RCTs see far less uptake.[NBER WP 35051 | PDF]
• New bounds on labor supply elasticities allowing for heterogeneity and income effects find that Norwegian self-employed have compensated elasticities at most 0.16 and uncompensated elasticities near zero, implying the excess burden of taxation is small. [NBER WP 35047 | PDF]
• The DiD Digest reviews four new papers showing that standard stacked DiD does not identify a clean causal average, discrete outcomes violate parallel trends, matched DiD inference requires new methods, and data-driven control selection can improve credibility, offering practical guidance for applied researchers.[DiD Digest | PDF]

Other Economics

• The UK Home Secretary’s £10 billion migrant cost claim selectively combined three negative subgroups while omitting £47 billion in positive contributions from skilled workers, constructing migrants as a fiscal burden to justify restrictive settlement policy. [PDF]
• Vertically integrated US health insurers raised prices at their own pharmacies by 9.5% after Medicare profit caps were introduced, tunneling $1.2 billion in profits to unregulated subsidiaries—with the federal government bearing 21% of the inflated costs. [NBER WP 35043 | PDF]
• A Finnish grant reform that exogenously shifted transfers across municipalities increased private sector jobs at a cost of €33,000 per job, with workers switching from commuting to working locally rather than migrating, suggesting fiscal transfers can support distressed areas without distorting residential choices. [AEJ | PDF]
• About half the gap in hours worked between Americans and non-Americans has reversed since the 1990s, with US hours declining mainly due to the rise of government health benefits—especially Medicaid—provided to the non-employed, while non-US countries saw hours rise from higher wages and falling disutility of work. [NBER WP 35020 | PDF]
• Germany’s mandatory executive gender quota increased female representation among top executives by two-thirds, primarily through outside recruitment, with no detectable effects on firm value, performance, or broader gender-equality policies. [NBER WP 35030 | PDF]