In many European countries established leftwing and rightwing parties have been threatened by policy convergence and, in turn, new populist parties that offer more polarized platforms. I investigate whether government ideology influences dragnet-controls - controls of persons conducted by the...

We examine how Green governments influence macroeconomic, education, and environmental outcomes. We exploit that the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan gave rise to an unanticipated change in government in the German state Baden-Wuerttemberg in 2011. Using the synthetic control method, we find...

We compare and contrast the economic growth performance of Estonia and Georgia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 in an attempt to understand better the extent to which the growth differential between the two countries can be traced to increased efficiency in the use of capital and...

The harmonized European value-added tax (VAT) is anything but a modern consumption tax that taxes all goods and services at a uniform rate. As exemplified by an analysis of the Dutch version, some 60% of the base is exempted, that is, not taxed on output but on inputs. This has serious...

I leverage a Pakistani tax reform that cuts the tax rate on the supply chains of five major industries of the country from 15% to 0% to cast light on the extent of, and mechanisms driving, VAT noncompliance in a representative emerging economy. I find that firms overclaim refunds by 22% and...

The world runs a trade surplus with itself: the reported values of exports exceed the reported values of imports. This is a logically impossible but well-known empirical fact. Less well-known is the fact that, in recent years, more than 80 percent of the global surplus is a trade surplus that...

We develop a simple structural model of value added tax (VAT) compliance, and estimate it using widely available national accounts data to learn about compliance in countries where little is currently known. International border controls improve VAT compliance, generating a correlation between...

Tax enforcement can be prohibitively costly when market transactions and participants are difficult to observe. Evasion among market participants may reduce tax revenue and provide certain types of suppliers an undue competitive advantage. Whether efforts to fully enforce taxes are worthwhile...

Technological innovations facilitating e-commerce have well-documented effects on consumer behavior and firm organization in the retail sector, but the effects of these new transaction technologies on fiscal systems remain unknown. By extending models of commodity tax competition to include...

During the period 1996-2000, the coverage of VAT in Pakistan rose by twenty times in terms of the number of firms in the tax net and by ten times in terms of the volume of transactions subject to it. This paper leverages this staggered introduction of VAT in the country to estimate its...