ITO Research Roundup

Weekly summaries of recent studies and posts relevant for our work

Brought to you by Matt and Claude Code

📅 July 22, 2026

🏢

Multinational Taxation

In its first year, the Global Minimum Tax raised low-taxed MNEs’ effective tax rates by 1.7 percentage points and generated EUR 79-109bn in extra global corporate tax revenue, with no drop in investment or employment.[OECD Taxation WP 77 | PDF]
An IMF review of tax instruments for digital cross-border services concludes that destination-based taxation like VAT addresses profit-shifting and remote-supply challenges more effectively than distortionary digital services taxes, which pass through to consumers and cut digital-services imports. [IMF WP 26/152 | PDF]
The 2018-2019 US tariff increases boosted employment in Mexican multinational firms within the most exposed sectors, especially for highly educated workers and small establishments, with no clear effect on wages. [IDB WP 01834 | PDF]

🔍

Tax Evasion & Administration

India’s 2017 GST, by granting input tax credits only for purchases from registered suppliers, drove formalization cascades upstream over five years, as large firms’ share of national GST collections fell from 46% to 30% and smaller enterprises entered the tax net. [SSRN 6213439 | PDF]
Across Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru informality is an active response to fiscal incentives, and in a Mexico calibration the welfare-maximizing degree of income-tax progressivity is about five times the current near-flat level. [PDF]
Retaliatory tariffs in the 2018 trade war cut compliance by 25 percentage points—each one-point tariff hike lowers compliance 1 to 2 points—costing roughly $3.5 billion in foregone tariff revenue in 2019. [CESifo WP 12643 | PDF]
After automatic bank-information exchange took hold, Norwegians who grew wealthy became far less likely to shift money offshore, and the 7% tax-payment drop that once accompanied offshore transfers fell to under 1%. [NBER WP 35505 | PDF]
Brazil’s 2023 VAT reform spreads the tax burden more evenly, but approved reduced rates aggravate regressivity while expanding the cashback could raise the poorest’s disposable income by 25%. [IMF WP 26/132 | PDF]
A randomized trial with 3,551 Ethiopian business owners found letters stressing tax obligations raised reported profit tax declarations, but the effect did not differ between male and female owners at either the intensive or extensive margin. [World Bank WP 11409 | PDF]
Automatic bank information exchange roughly doubled South Africans’ self-reported foreign income, yet around half stays hidden because the detection risk from non-compliance stayed modest—about a 1 percentage-point excess audit risk for the average account holder. [Oxford CBT WP 2026-02 | PDF]
A randomized experiment with 1,006 married Japanese women near the 1.03 million yen earnings threshold found tax information raised stated planned earnings by 0.9% and intent to cross the threshold by 4.3%, yet produced no change in actual labor supply a year later. [TUPD 2026-009 | PDF]

💸

Illicit Financial Flows & Real Estate

Using staggered difference-in-differences on 2006-2023 data, sanctions cut the number of cross-border M&A deals from sanctioning to target countries by roughly 50%, rising to 68% after six years and hitting mining, manufacturing and energy hardest. [RIETI DP 26-E-032 | PDF]
Financial sanctions in 2021-2025 severed sanctioned banks’ correspondent links to dollar and euro networks, and de-risking pushed even non-sanctioned banks in Belarus, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and Myanmar toward the Chinese yuan.[NBER WP 35453 | PDF]
Following the Panama and Paradise Papers leaks, prices of cryptocurrencies traded against Singapore and Hong Kong dollars rose about 10% relative to non-haven currencies, indicating individuals use crypto to move funds into and out of tax havens.[CESifo WP 12740 | PDF]

🌿

Tax & Environment

A novel monthly measure of effective carbon taxes across Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden shows a €10 rise cuts emissions by 4.8% but also lowers GDP by 2.2% and raises unemployment by 0.4pp, implying prior studies understate the economic cost.[AEJ: Macroeconomics 2026, 18(3) | PDF]
Sweden’s carbon tax on transport fuel grew steadily more regressive from 1999 to 2012 as income inequality rose, and a cross-country comparison of high-income nations confirms higher inequality produces more regressive gasoline taxes. [Environmental and Resource Economics 2026 | PDF]

💎

Wealth Taxation

Over 80% of UK and Spanish respondents back a wealth tax regardless of information, and correcting misperceptions about inequality shifts beliefs but not support—a belief-to-preference dissociation. [INET Oxford WP 2026-16 | PDF]
A new harmonized database of estate, inheritance, and gift taxes in 170+ countries shows a one-point rise in the top rate lifts revenues by about 8%, while cuts of 10%+ slash revenues by half within four years and higher progressivity lowers the wealth Gini.[Stone Center WP 129 | PDF]
Left-wing Spanish municipal governments raise effective property tax rates about twice as much as right-wing ones and are 5% likelier to adopt the local capital gains tax, with effects amplified under experienced multi-term mayors. [IDEAGOV WP 2025-02 | PDF]
Across EU HFCS and US SCF data, non-primary real estate such as vacation homes and rental properties is the most concentrated household asset class of all, with Gini coefficients of 0.88-0.96, so housing’s equalizing reputation holds only for owner-occupied homes. [Stone Center WP 127 | PDF]

📊

Other Tax

Eliminating US capital gains taxes on startup investments (QSBS) pushed venture capitalists toward riskier pre-commercial startups with higher failure rates but also more unicorns, while angel and corporate investors didn’t respond. [Oxford CBT WP 2025-10 | PDF]

🔧

Methods

A new axiomatically-derived inequality measure equal to the expected income ratio between two random individuals shows global inequality fell from about 5 in 1990 to 3.8 in 2024 as between-country gaps narrowed, while US inequality rose through widening within-state gaps.[Journal of Development Economics 2026 | PDF]
A new switcher difference-in-differences estimator shows Finland’s size-based payroll tax notch cut treated firms’ employment, capital, and value added by about 10 percent and left 18 percent fewer firms above the threshold, effects conventional DiD misses entirely. [NBER WP 35484 | PDF]

📌

Other Economics

Special economic zones across Viet Nam’s 63 provinces (2006–2020) boosted foreign-firm employment and revenues but shrank domestic private firms and worsened land access, transparency, and informal charges. [ADB Economics WP 848 | PDF]
A sufficiently high risk of agents falling into extreme poverty makes wealth inequality generate asset bubbles, as households place near-infinite value on assets insulated from idiosyncratic risk—even under stationary wealth distributions and no aggregate uncertainty. [NBER WP 35393 | PDF]
China’s Trans-Regional Jurisdiction reform, which moves administrative lawsuits to courts outside the defendant government’s home region, raised corporate investment by 28.7 percent by shielding judges from local political capture. [Journal of Development Economics | PDF]
Across 259 Fortune 500 CEOs and two preregistered studies, narcissistic leaders resist remote work because it threatens their motivations for power and status, not because of concerns about firm performance. [OBHDP vol 195 | PDF]
AI answer engines that divert publisher traffic and source-level quality signals without replacing them can push costly human information below replacement, collapsing open-web content even with truthful sources, accurate answers, and rational users.[NBER WP 35344 | PDF]
Large-scale land acquisitions across 38 African countries raise local civic unrest 158%, driven by domestic elites capturing customary food-crop land, eroding traditional authority and boosting opposition votes and turnout. [PDF]
About 80% of African VC deals involve a foreign investor and over 60% of funded founders studied or worked abroad, as scarce local equity capital tilts the startup ecosystem toward foreign-connected entrepreneurs. [NBER WP 35261 | PDF]

📅 June 15, 2026

🏢

Multinational Taxation

Around the 2024 rollout of the Pillar Two global minimum tax, banks with high pre-reform low-tax exposure saw larger declines in profitability and Tier 1 capital buffers, with meaningful tail risk concentrated in thin-buffer banks. [IES WP 9/2026 | PDF]

🔍

Tax Evasion & Administration

Spanish Baby Boomers show higher tax morale and acceptance of redistributive taxation, while younger generations embrace markedly lower pro-tax attitudes, hinting at a looming generational threat to the welfare-state fiscal consensus. [ICePP WP 26-22 | PDF]
Cross-linking siloed municipal and national tax records for 155,000 Kampala firms almost triples detectable non-compliance, yet deterrence nudges fail to substitute for fixing bureaucratic fragmentation itself. [IFS WP 26/39 | PDF]
In a property-tax field experiment in Junin, Argentina, deterrence letters raised men’s overall compliance but only shifted women’s payment timing, as liquidity-constrained female-led households stay unresponsive, so blunt enforcement can widen gender inequality. [Int. Tax and Public Finance | PDF]

💸

Illicit Financial Flows & Real Estate

A new ‘abnormality method’ combining gravity models with machine learning estimates abnormal financial flows to tax havens hit US$2.8 trillion in 2023, costing over US$60 billion in foregone tax revenue. [IES WP 8/2026 | PDF]

🌿

Tax & Environment

A quantitative trade model finds standalone US carbon tariffs raise domestic emissions and deliver only half the global reductions of pairing tariffs with a domestic carbon tax, which also yields larger welfare gains. [PDF]
US double taxation treaties signed with emerging economies between 1990 and 2014 significantly reduced CO2 emissions, apparently by curbing investment in pollution-intensive industries. [ICePP WP 26-21 | PDF]

📊

Other Tax

Simulating tax-to-GDP ratios from 1950 to 2060, the OECD shows population ageing mechanically erodes labour-income tax revenues, with each country’s exposure shaped by both demographics and tax design. [OECD Taxation WP 75 | PDF]

🔧

Methods

A new Stata command, lwdid, implements rolling difference-in-differences estimation for staggered-adoption designs, handling both large panels and small-sample settings with few treated or control units. [PDF]
A harmonized 1992-2023 global nighttime-lights series correcting for top-coding, blooming, and satellite changes predicts local development better than unadjusted data, especially over time and at fine spatial resolution.[PDF]

📅 June 01, 2026

🔍

Tax Evasion & Administration

Higher tax burdens on formalization significantly reduce formal employment in Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador, with the strongest disincentives among low-wage self-employed workers facing minimum social-contribution floors.[IZA DP 18621 | PDF]
Across four decades of Danish tax reforms, wage earners show near-zero taxable-income elasticity while the self-employed range from 0.05 to 0.45, with third-party reporting—not adjustment frictions—explaining the micro-macro puzzle. [Umea Economic Studies 1046 | PDF]
Automatic information exchange roughly doubled South Africans’ self-reported foreign income, yet about half of offshore income remains non-compliant because audit detection risk stayed modest. [WIDER WP 2026/58 | PDF]
Nigeria has built advanced CRS/automatic-exchange infrastructure—recovering €16m in CRS-informed audits—but data on individual taxpayers remains largely underutilised due to capacity gaps and fiscal federalism. [ICTD WP 240 | PDF]

💸

Illicit Financial Flows & Real Estate

Tracing US rental ownership through LLCs and partnerships to ultimate owners shows individual landlords own about 61% of rental units, and that common mailing-address methods systematically misstate portfolio size. [NBER | PDF]
Mirror-trade data reveal systematic under-invoicing of South African mineral exports, implying R30-50 billion in foregone mineral royalties over 2015-2024. [MPRA 129014 | PDF]
FATF grey-listing cuts cross-border capital inflows by 1.3-2.6% of quarterly GDP, with delisting prompting only partial recovery as correspondent-banking frictions persist.[IDB WP 1823 | PDF]

🌿

Tax & Environment

Japan’s fuel-economy subsidy improved the fuel economy of vehicles sold in the US by 8.65%, so most of its CO2 reductions occur abroad through multinational “attribute propagation.”[PDF]
China’s waste-import ban improved air and water quality but triggered a surge in smuggling, leaving a net welfare loss of $25.65 per tonne as environmental gains were offset by evasion and distortion costs. [CEP DP 2181 | PDF]

💎

Wealth Taxation

California billionaires now hold over $2 trillion—half the state GDP—but pay just 0.2% of their wealth in state income tax, so a proposed 5% one-time wealth tax could raise about $100 billion. [NBER WP 35218 | PDF]

📊

Other Tax

Graduates of high-tax elite US economics PhD programs produce 60-75% more impact-adjusted publications than non-elite peers, suggesting endowment-tax-driven admissions cuts could slow research output. [NBER WP 35244 | PDF]

🔧

Methods

A practitioner’s guide reframes complex difference-in-differences designs as aggregations of simple 2×2 building blocks, with R and Stata replication code for handling staggered timing, weights, and covariates.[JEL 2026 64(2) | PDF]
Testing for parallel pre-trends is only informative about difference-in-differences validity under specific selection mechanisms, and can wrongly discard valid designs when units select on pretreatment information.[AEA P&P 2026 | PDF]

📌

Other Economics

A new rare-earth-augmented input-output table ranks Korea, Japan, and Germany as most exposed to rare-earth supply shocks, reflecting heavy downstream manufacturing with little domestic mining or refining.[AEA P&P 2026 | PDF]
US mutual-fund holdings of Chinese renminbi bonds halved from about $20bn in 2021 to $10bn in 2024, driven mainly by funds exiting RMB positions entirely amid geopolitical tension.[AEA P&P 2026 | PDF]

📅 May 11, 2026

🏢

Multinational Taxation

Fewer than 1% of South African multinationals trip red flags for profit shifting(pdf), but this small subset accounts for a disproportionate share of tax revenue at risk, offering tax authorities a replicable audit-prioritization framework. [WIDER WP 2026/43 | PDF]

🔍

Tax Evasion & Administration

South Africa’s progressive personal income tax partially offset rising inequality from trade openness(pdf) between 2012 and 2021, as benefits of openness accrued mainly to top earners while middle-class workers were adversely affected. [IZA DP 18551 | PDF]
Across 20 advanced economies since 1980, adopting dual income taxation raises the top 10% income share by 0.67pp and the top 1% share by 0.50pp(pdf), with effects emerging immediately after reform consistent with income shifting from labour to capital.[CESifo WP 12642 | PDF]
An African Arguments essay argues Tinubu’s drive to lift Nigeria’s tax-to-GDP ratio from under 10% to 13.5%(link) sits uneasily with the country’s vast informal economy and its colonial fiscal origins, raising political questions about state legitimacy. [African Arguments | PDF]

💎

Wealth Taxation

Spain’s reintroduced regional wealth tax pushed the wealthy toward Madrid, with mobility-induced personal income tax losses six times larger than the direct wealth tax losses(pdf)—and Madrid could raise its own revenues by agreeing to a harmonized positive rate. [AEJ: Applied Economics | PDF]

📊

Other Tax

Italy’s Controesodo tax break for returnees generates a migration elasticity just below one(pdf), with sizable responses across the upper half of the earnings distribution and the scheme paying for itself if enough returnees stay after eligibility ends. [RFBerlin DP 097/26 | PDF]
Canadian inter-provincial migration responds strongly to tax differentials for young, unmarried high earners(pdf), with a population stock-elasticity of 2.5–3 driven by reduced out-migration rather than increased in-migration. [McMaster WP 2026-03 | PDF]

📅 May 04, 2026

🔍

Tax Evasion & Administration

Denmark’s 2016 tightening of dividend-withholding tax enforcement eliminated cum-cum/cum-ex share-loan spikes around dividend dates and raised annual DWT revenue by 130% without harming the investment climate .[AEJ: Economic Policy | PDF]
Ecuador’s 2008 personal-income-tax deduction reform created paper-trail demand from consumers and significantly raised reported profits among self-employed businesses, with positive net revenue impact and VAT spillovers .[AEJ: Economic Policy | PDF]
A Finnish RCT combining novel third-party ownership data with enforcement letters increased the propensity of suspected landlords to report rental income by over 30%, with positive spillovers across ownership networks .[AEJ: Economic Policy | PDF]

💸

Illicit Financial Flows & Real Estate

Random judge assignment in Finland shows prison sentences for financial-crime defendants reduce reoffending by 42.9pp and cut colleagues’ financial crimes by 27pp—a substantial general-deterrence spillover, concentrated in fraud cases .[AEJ: Economic Policy | PDF]

📊

Other Tax

Switching the US from joint to individual taxation of married couples shifts the Laffer curve peak up by 18 percentage points and yields 0.8% consumption-equivalent welfare gains via higher labor force participation .[NBER WP 35137 | PDF]
Higher US state corporate income tax rates significantly increase establishment-level financial distress, especially for geographically concentrated firms; the 2017 TCJA’s interest deduction limit reduced distress by inducing deleveraging .[NBER WP 35134 | PDF]
A 1998-2001 Canadian tax decentralization reform yields a population stock-elasticity of 2.5-3 for young, unmarried high-income individuals, driven by reduced out-migration rather than in-migration .[McMaster WP 2026-03 | PDF]

🔧

Methods

A welfare criterion ruling out extreme utility cardinalizations requires tax revenues to be concave in narrowly targeted reforms; heterogeneous taxable-income elasticities mean the 1990 US schedule was Pareto efficient but failed this stronger test .[AER | PDF]

📅 April 27, 2026

🏢

Multinational Taxation

Thai SME tax incentives induced 75.8% higher profitability among tax-eligible affiliates within domestic corporate groups relative to ineligible siblings after a 2011 revenue threshold, showing that profit shifting via transfer pricing is not exclusive to multinationals. [PIER DP 248 | PDF]
Tracing capital through offshore tax havens for 161,773 firms in 159 countries, Chinese-controlled foreign assets reached $2.1 trillion (3% of global corporate assets) by 2021—far broader than official FDI data—with state-owned enterprises targeting R&D-intensive firms and exhibiting an ‘innovation spillback’ to Chinese parents. [NBER WP 35106 | PDF]

🔍

Tax Evasion & Administration

Randomly providing property tax education to Ghanaian taxpayers and officials raises knowledge and spreads through neighbour conversations, but ultimately has no impact on tax payments as taxpayers revise enforcement-capacity beliefs downward and learn legal ways to reduce their burden. [PDF]
After tax evasion was publicly blamed for the 2010 Greek fiscal collapse and judges saw their salaries cut, the Supreme Court’s rejection rate for tax-evasion appeals rose 25 percentage points (a 43% jump) relative to homicide and rape appeals, with effects strongest in months of high public salience. [IZA DP 18489 | PDF]

💸

Illicit Financial Flows & Real Estate

Colombia’s mid-2010s cocaine production surge propagated through legitimate banana export routes, raising homicides 41% in Colombian ports, nearly five-fold in Ecuador, and 7% in European port provinces—with violence concentrating wherever criminal control of trade chokepoints was contested. [SSRN 6221120 | PDF]

📊

Other Tax

After Norway made individual tax returns searchable online in 2001, within-firm gender wage gaps fell by 2.2 percentage points (8.7%), driven by rising female wages concentrated among job-changers, suggesting tax transparency operates through better information for job search. [Statistics Norway DP 1033 | PDF]

📌

Other Economics

Decomposing bilateral hostility into military, sanctions, and diplomatic layers using GDELT data, governments have nearly doubled the trade-weighted share of conflict channelled through economic coercion, with kinetic and trade-context hostility putting roughly $334bn of bilateral trade at risk—half from US–China alone.[NBER WP 35077 | PDF]
Modelling colonial trade monopolies as implicit export taxes, exclusive trading companies improve metropolitan terms of trade only when colony and metropolis are sectoral rivals—and turn against the metropolis when complementary—explaining the East India Company’s shifting political coalition before and after Britain’s industrial revolution.[NBER WP 35121 | PDF]

📅 April 13, 2026

🏢

Multinational Taxation

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]

🌿

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]
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]
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]

🔧

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 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]
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]

📅 March 30, 2026

🏢

Multinational Taxation

Small French MNEs below the BEPS reporting threshold significantly increased tax-haven affiliate openings after 2016, while large MNEs exited—suggesting OECD transparency reforms reallocated profit shifting down the firm size distribution rather than reducing it. [GREDEG WP 2026-10 | PDF]
The Senate’s two-thirds treaty approval requirement has driven a shift from Article II tax treaties to executive agreements since 2011, risking U.S. exclusion from multilateral tax governance and a bifurcated international tax system. [Wash. U. L. Rev. | PDF]

🔍

Tax Evasion & Administration

Income taxes have limited effects on formal employment but increase labor informality by 3–5% in developing economies with weak enforcement, as workers shift to informal arrangements rather than reducing labor supply.[IZA DP 18449 | PDF]
Norwegian tax reform data show the elasticity of taxable income rises steeply with income, from 0.1 at the median to 0.45 at the 90th percentile, implying substantial excess burden and that cutting top tax rates would raise revenue. [NBER WP 34987 | PDF]
Kenyan RCT shows electronic payment adoption raises SME tax payments by 17% through greater transaction traceability, while a calibrated model reveals inflation can increase cash usage and tax evasion when e-payments are non-interest-bearing. [PDF]
Peru’s incentive transfer program significantly boosted district-level property tax collection over a decade by rewarding municipalities that exceeded collection thresholds, demonstrating that targeted fiscal incentives can strengthen subnational revenue effort. [ICPP WP 26-12 | PDF]

📌

Other Economics

U.S. postdoc numbers quadrupled from 1979 to 2023 while faculty positions stagnated, and with recent declines in postdoc numbers, tightening immigration, and rising pay, the U.S. may have reached “peak postdoc.” [NBER WP 35014 | PDF]
Deposit rate increases reduce stablecoin market capitalization growth by roughly 3 percentage points per basis point, with effects three times larger when instrumented, confirming stablecoins and bank deposits are substitutes. [PDF]
RCT with 11,000 Korean consumers shows exogenous increases in expected public debt raise inflation expectations and boost spending by 0.4pp, while higher expected fiscal balances raise growth expectations but do not affect spending. [NBER WP 35009 | PDF]

📅 March 23, 2026

🏢

Multinational Taxation

The global minimum tax will increase Slovak corporate tax revenues by 4%, with half coming from top-up taxes and half from reduced profit shifting, targeting 49% of previously shifted profits. [PDF]

🔍

Tax Evasion & Administration

Reduced VAT rates across EU member states lower VAT regressivity but produce only modest redistribution overall, as between-group progressive effects are largely offset by within-group horizontal inequities among households with similar incomes.[JRC WP 02/2026 | PDF]
Dutch taxpayers exploit classification ambiguity to strategically shift wealth across tax categories in response to audit announcements, with a one-year dividend tax cut triggering a €1.9 billion surge in declared capital income. [PDF]
A nudge flyer combined with the owner code required for application increased automatic debit registration for property tax by 8.8 percentage points in Yokohama, though the intervention had no detectable effect on on-time payment rates. [RIETI DP 26-E-023 | PDF]
Corruption outside tax authorities—bribes for operating licenses and government contracts—increases firms’ tax evasion by up to 24 percentage points in sub-Saharan Africa, challenging assumptions from European studies that only tax-official corruption matters.[PDF]

📅 March 16, 2026

🔍

Tax Evasion & Administration

A randomized controlled trial in Gorontalo, Indonesia finds that soft-tone WhatsApp nudges emphasizing civic duty raised property tax compliance by 9.9 percentage points, with effects driven entirely by historically poor compliers and persisting six months after the intervention. [World Bank WP 11320 | PDF]
Georgia’s 2021 Large Taxpayer Office raised annual tax assessments by 0.4–0.7% of GDP, concentrated in VAT and withholding taxes, by combining targeted enforcement with improved taxpayer services while making audits fewer but more selective. [IMF WP 26/31 | PDF]
Using linked administrative tax records and a tailored survey of Uruguayan taxpayers, peer behavior is the strongest predictor of tax evasion, with economic factors also mattering, while social preferences (honesty, tax morale) have little predictive power. [IZA DP 18387 | PDF]

🔧

Methods

Dimitrov and Kühn prove that optimal investment portfolios exist in discrete-time capital gains tax models with limited loss offsets, establishing closedness of attainable terminal wealth under a no-unbounded-non-substitutable-investment condition.[PDF]
Stevenson and Fischman show that ignoring researcher behavior in econometric design causes IV estimates to exhibit severe bias even with first-stage F-statistics of 200, standard errors to understate uncertainty, and threshold testing on F-statistics to actually reduce bias when null results are suppressed.[SSRN 6308160 | PDF]

📌

Other Economics

Analyzing all US Supreme Court economic cases from 1953 to 2022, Prat, Scott Morton, and Spitz find that Republican-appointed justices have grown dramatically more pro-wealthy, with an estimated party gap of 47 percentage points by 2022. [NBER WP 34643 | PDF]

📅 March 09, 2026

🏢

Multinational Taxation

First globally comparable corporate elasticity of taxable income estimates from 16 countries find ETIs ranging from 0.08 to 1.9 (average 0.79), implying that identical corporate tax reforms generate sharply different revenue effects across countries.[NBER WP 34945 | PDF]

🔍

Tax Evasion & Administration

An IMF primer explains that over 70 developing economies collect less than 15% of GDP in tax revenue, but well-designed reforms could raise an additional 4–5 percentage points, as demonstrated by Jamaica, Rwanda, and Morocco.[IMF F&D | web]
Machine learning audit targeting in Pakistan generates Rs 285,000 (~$2,800) net revenue per audit, while the real-world program lost Rs 173,000 (~$1,700) per audit—and targeting based on long-run deterrence outperforms targeting based on immediate revenue recovery. [Tulane WP 2603 | web]
A JEL review argues that reforms to tax administration’s organizational structure, personnel management, and task management—complemented by efforts to build state legitimacy—can raise tax capacity in developing countries beyond what information trails alone achieve.[JEL 2026 | PDF]
IMF microsimulations show that tax exemptions and fuel subsidies in Comoros are regressive, disproportionately benefiting higher-income households, highlighting the need for better-targeted redistribution. [IMF SIP 2026/016 | PDF]

🌿

Tax & Environment

Trade union environmental awareness acts as a substitute for environmental taxation: as unions internalize pollution damages in wage negotiations, the regulator optimally sets a lower emissions tax.[U. Macedonia DP 03/2026 | PDF]

💎

Wealth Taxation

📊

Other Tax

🔧

Methods

📅 February 23, 2026

🏢

Multinational Taxation

🔍

Tax Evasion & Administration

💎

Wealth Taxation

Global capital income inequality fell from a Gini of 97% to 94% between 2000 and 2020, with the share of people earning positive property income more than doubling as Western nations lost positions to China and Russia.[Stone Center WP 125 | PDF]

📊

Other Tax

🔧

Methods

📅 February 09, 2026

🏢

Multinational Taxation

🔍

Tax Evasion & Administration

💸

Illicit Financial Flows & Real Estate

🌿

Tax & Environment

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Wealth Taxation

Optimal tax model shows eliminating dividend taxes while raising the corporate income tax to keep investment constant increases total revenue by 0.1-0.4% of GDP, because retained earnings already let entrepreneurs avoid personal taxation.[CEPR | PDF]

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Other Tax

Generated 2026-07-22 15:12