ITO Research Roundup
ITO Research Roundup
Weekly summaries of recent studies and posts relevant for our work
Brought to you by Matt and Claude Code
📅 May 11, 2026
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Multinational Taxation
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]
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Tax Evasion & Administration
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]
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Wealth Taxation
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]
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Other Tax
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
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Tax Evasion & Administration
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]
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Illicit Financial Flows & Real Estate
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]
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Other Tax
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]
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Methods
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
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Multinational Taxation
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]
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Tax Evasion & Administration
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]
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Illicit Financial Flows & Real Estate
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]
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Other Tax
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]
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Other Economics
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
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Multinational Taxation
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]
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Tax Evasion & Administration
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]
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Illicit Financial Flows & Real Estate
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]
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Tax & Environment
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]
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Wealth Taxation
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]
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Other Tax
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]
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Methods
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]
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Other Economics
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
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Multinational Taxation
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]
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Tax Evasion & Administration
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]
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Other Economics
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
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Multinational Taxation
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]
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Tax Evasion & Administration
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
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Tax Evasion & Administration
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]
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Methods
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]
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Other Economics
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
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Multinational Taxation
Multinational Taxation
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Tax Evasion & Administration
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]
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Tax & Environment
Tax & Environment
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Wealth Taxation
Wealth Taxation
- Eliminating dividend taxes while raising the corporate income tax to keep investment unchanged would increase total tax revenue by 0.1–0.4% of GDP, since dividend taxes create avoidance distortions that the CIT avoids.[THEMA WP 2026-02 | PDF]
- Swiss private wealth reached 4.2× GDP with the top-1% share rising from 37% to 45% since 2003, while effective inheritance tax rates fell by a factor of three as cantons abolished bequest taxes for direct descendants.
[E4S White Paper | PDF]
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Other Tax
Other Tax
- As AI displaces human labor, consumption taxation emerges as the primary revenue instrument; if autonomous AGI systems eventually absorb resources directly, even consumption taxes become inadequate and taxing AGI becomes an optimal harvesting problem.[Brookings WP | PDF]
- Germany’s temporary three-percentage-point VAT cut in the second half of 2020 increased aggregate consumption spending by 4.4%, with the strongest response among households who perceived full pass-through to prices. [CRC TR 224 DP 728 | PDF]
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Methods
Methods
- An IMF team uses GPT-4.1 to build the first global quarterly database of discretionary spending shocks for 64 countries (1952–2023), estimating a median government spending multiplier of 0.7 with larger effects in less open economies and during downturns.[IMF WP 26/43 | PDF]
- Forensic methods including satellite imagery, mirror trade data, price monitoring, and refugee surveys can extract credible economic information from “black hole” economies like North Korea where official statistics are unavailable.
[VoxDev | web]
📅 February 23, 2026
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Multinational Taxation
Multinational Taxation
- Japanese multinationals reduce related-party export prices as tax differentials widen, but country-by-country reporting had no effect on transfer mispricing. [CIRJE DP F-1266 | PDF]
- Higher corporate tax rates boost productivity growth for frontier firms but slow catch-up for less productive firms, challenging the conventional linear negative view of business taxation.[arqus DP 310 | PDF]
- MNE profit shifting to tax havens causally reduces domestic employment by 6%, concentrated among high-skilled workers who are relocated to justify tax-minimizing intra-firm payments.[CESifo WP 12464 | PDF]
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Tax Evasion & Administration
Tax Evasion & Administration
- UK tax-benefit policy protected low-income households during 2019-2023 crises, while frozen income tax thresholds created fiscal drag that reduced real living standards across the rest of the distribution. [CeMPA WP 1/26 | PDF]
- A one percentage point VAT increase reduces firm-level employee costs by 3.9% and country-level wages by 2.8%, with small firms and young workers hit hardest.[arqus DP 311 | PDF]
- Higher-income taxpayers’ larger behavioral responses to top-bracket tax changes reflect tax salience rather than higher substitution elasticities, implying greater revenue potential from progressive rate structures. [NBER WP 34731 | PDF]
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Wealth Taxation
Wealth Taxation
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Other Tax
Other Tax
- Auckland fuel prices passed through a regional fuel tax nearly symmetrically on average, but stations near competitors under different tax regimes showed sticky-downward pricing after repeal.
[Waikato WP 1/26 | PDF] - As AI erodes labor income and consumption tax bases, optimal taxation shifts toward consumption taxes in a post-labor economy and eventually to taxing autonomous AGI capital at the human discount rate.[NBER WP 34873 | PDF]
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Methods
Methods
- EarlyReview, a new screening tool for pre-analysis plans, finds that the average PAP on the AEA registry passes only 80% of quality checks, with multiple hypothesis testing procedures most often unspecified.[web]
- The GABRIEL software package validates GPT as an accurate and direct measurement tool for quantifying attributes in qualitative data, performing indistinguishably from human annotators across 1000+ tasks.[NBER WP 34834 | PDF]
📅 February 09, 2026
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Multinational Taxation
Multinational Taxation
- Panel data on 150 MNEs (2018-2023) shows tax-minimizing strategies boost firm value, but only firms with strong governance sustain the gains — tech firms face the highest regulatory risk from aggressive planning.[Public Finance | PDF]
- Vietnam experienced genuine trade reallocation rather than rerouting after US-China tariffs, increasing domestic value added in exports by up to 12pp, partly driven by Chinese firms relocating production via FDI.
[CEPR VoxEU | web] - New JRC top-down methodology estimates EU corporate income tax gaps ranging from below 3% to above 35% across member states, with an average gap of 10.9% (EUR 38 billion in 2017), concentrated in cash-intensive sectors.
[Public Economics | PDF] - Calibrated model shows the 15% global minimum tax induces tax havens to adopt split rates — taxing large MNEs at 15% while cutting rates for smaller firms — yielding 36bn in global revenue gains but concentrated in non-haven countries.[Public Finance | PDF]
- After ICIJ offshore data leaks, implicated firms appointed more directors in audit and finance roles, paid higher dividends, and reduced tax haven presence — without raising effective tax rates — in a net-positive reputational repair for shareholders.[CEPR | PDF]
- Quantitative model shows the 2017 US TCJA generated positive spillovers abroad (raising EU GDP by 0.2%), while a GMT adopted outside the US creates negative inward spillovers for the US even when American MNEs are exempt. [Public Economics | PDF]
- EU country-by-country reporting raised large multinationals’ effective tax rates by 1-2pp, reducing their consolidated sales by 5% and lowering industry concentration in sectors where top firms were affected. [Public Economics | PDF]
- Costa Rica’s elimination of tax holidays for new free-zone investors provides causal evidence that investment promotion agencies can sustain FDI inflows even after generous tax incentives are removed.
[Journal of Development Economics | web] - Chilean transfer pricing reform failed to reduce profit shifting or raise tax payments, but dramatically increased demand for transfer pricing consultants, illustrating how enforcement complexity benefits the advisory industry.
[CEPR | PDF] - Managers from countries with one SD more progressive gender norms reduce their team’s gender pay gap by 5pp (18%), primarily through higher promotion rates for women, with effects persisting after the manager rotates out.[NBER | PDF]
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Tax Evasion & Administration
Tax Evasion & Administration
- Centralizing tax audits in six Chinese provinces improved audit quality by reducing local influence, though at the cost of local knowledge. [NBER | web]
- Malthusian growth model shows early states’ tax capacity exhibits an inverted-U effect on population: moderate taxation funds productive public goods and drives expansion, but overtaxation leads to collapse and defeat by rival states.[Public Economics | PDF]
- Multiple tax audits in Uganda increase VAT liabilities by UGX 362 million among consistent filers, while single audits have no significant effect, highlighting the importance of repeat enforcement interactions.
[Public Economics | PDF] - Estimates Spain’s personal income tax gap for 2003-2022, finding evasion concentrated among self-employment and capital income with underreporting as the dominant form of noncompliance. [Informal & Underground Economics | PDF]
- Successful tax reform requires concurrent tax administration reform that goes beyond enforcement to include taxpayer services, trust-building, and new technologies.[Public Economics | PDF]
- Belgium’s 2016 payroll tax exemption for first hires sharply increased one-worker firms by 10%, but most new employers lacked the productivity to grow beyond a single employee.
[Public Finance | PDF] - Economists’ tax policy recommendations routinely fail politically because they ignore broadly defined distributional effects–who wins and who loses–that drive how people and their representatives vote.[Public Economics | PDF]
- Review synthesises evidence that tax administration reforms–organisational structure, personnel management, task design, and state legitimacy–can raise tax capacity in developing countries beyond what information trails alone achieve.
[Manual | PDF] - Panel data across four developing countries (2005-2023) shows higher effective tax rates reduce SME performance, while targeted tax incentives and quality public services promote formalisation and growth.[Informal & Underground Economics | PDF]
- Survey experiment with 1,200 respondents in Bangalore finds corruption cues reduce willingness to disclose tax evasion and shift preferences toward indirect taxation, even though tax morale itself remains unchanged.
[Public Economics | PDF] - U.S. teleworkers are more likely to move interstate and realize larger state tax savings from moves–up to 2,970 for top earners vs. ,566 for non-teleworkers–strengthening the case for residence-based income taxation. [Public Finance | PDF]
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Illicit Financial Flows & Real Estate
Illicit Financial Flows & Real Estate
- A CGE model shows that cutting informal taxes–bribes, illegal fees, and extortion–in developing countries yields significant GDP and welfare gains economy-wide.[Informal & Underground Economics | web]
- An Oxford study finds Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong are replacing traditional Western offshore havens for African elites, with Dubai handling 95% of illegal gold from East and Central Africa.[ICIJ Blog | web]
- ICIJ investigation reveals crypto ATM scams surged 99% in 2024, with 33 million lost by November 2025; Iowa found over half of Bitcoin Depot transactions were scam-related. [ICIJ Blog | web]
- CEPR’s Richard Portes warns that multi-issuer stablecoins pose systemic risk to Europe, as US holders could use EU regulation to claim European reserves in a crisis. [CEPR VoxEU | web]
- Ransomware attacks on US hospitals increased in-hospital mortality by 34-38% for patients admitted when attacks began, causing an estimated 69-76 Medicare deaths between 2016-2021. [Manual | PDF]
- Model of tax evasion in a corrupt economy shows that firms use bribes to reduce tax payments, creating reinforcing dynamics between corruption and revenue loss.[Informal & Underground Economics | web]
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Tax & Environment
Tax & Environment
- Examines how CO2 emission regulation mechanisms interact with generation allocation and renewable energy certificates to affect overall carbon emissions.[Journal of Development Economics | web]
- OECD analysis of 49 countries finds carbon leakage rates average 14% overall, with carbon taxes raising import emission intensity while technology subsidies and regulations produce cleaner imports, suggesting policy mixes can limit leakage.[CEPR VoxEU | web]
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Wealth Taxation
Wealth Taxation
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Other Tax
Other Tax
- Regression discontinuity analysis of France’s salt tax and customs borders shows heavier indirect taxation drove pre-revolutionary unrest, peaking in the 1780s, and predicted deputies’ support for abolishing the monarchy. [NBER | PDF]
- Using the MVPF framework for Finland, top marginal income tax rates above 55% are self-defeatingly high, while VAT and inheritance taxes impose the least welfare cost per euro raised. [Public Finance | PDF]
- Incorporating loss aversion around institutional income thresholds into a Mirrlees optimal tax model raises optimal marginal rates globally and increases the optimal lump-sum transfer by 19-32% in U.S. calibrations. [Public Finance | PDF]
- Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia imposed windfall profit taxes on banks after the 2022-2023 monetary tightening cycle, which rapidly boosted floating-rate loan income while deposit rates lagged, widening spreads by up to 2.8 percentage points above the euro area.
[Public Economics | PDF] - Examines informal fiscal systems in developing countries — non-state taxation and service provision — and their interaction with formal state institutions.[Journal of Development Economics | web]
- India invoked the UN’s existing statistical definition of illicit financial flows at convention negotiations, affirming that aggressive tax avoidance by multinationals qualifies and challenging OECD resistance to the term. [Tax Justice Network | web]
- Revenue instability in OECD countries owes more to the correlation structure among tax sources than to reliance on individually volatile taxes, with non-economic factors also playing a significant role.[Public Finance | PDF]
- Mobile money taxes can backfire by pushing users away from formal digital payments, undermining financial inclusion and reducing transaction volumes in developing economies.[VoxDev | web]
- Fuel tax pass-through in a large metropolitan city does not vary with the number of nearby competitors, suggesting the entire metro area functions as a single geographic market and challenging standard isodistance-based market definitions.[CEPR | PDF]
- Targeted payroll tax reductions have limited effects on employment and wages, suggesting that narrowly designed hiring subsidies may not achieve their intended labor market outcomes.[Economic Journal | web]
- A French survey experiment (N=12,600) finds that removing tax credits reduces charitable donations but not political ones, while government matching increases giving amounts but lowers the share of people who donate to charities. [CEPR | PDF]
- Ending sales tax exemptions on soda and candy across five US states reduced purchases only when tax hikes exceeded five percentage points, with stronger responses for soda than candy and effects that grew over time. [Public Economics | PDF]
- Irish income tax policy changes since 2011 have had notable fiscal and distributional implications, reshaping the system’s progressivity and revenue capacity.
[Public Economics | web]