Welfare and Inequality with Hard-to-Tax Markets

Tax enforcement costs constrain the government's ability to observe economic activities, giving rise to hard-to-tax (HTT) markets. In this paper, we develop a Hotelling-type spatial model of sales taxation to analyze the welfare and distributional effects of the existence of HTT transactions. We show that an economy with HTT markets suffers from lower provision of public goods not only due to higher marginal cost of taxation, but also because (i) the planner might be concerned about the inequality in consumption caused by the unequal taxation across markets and (ii) the tax base might be over-extended to allow for a more inclusive taxation.