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 model the interaction between the informal credit market and the act of tax collection by the government; in presence and functioning of the informal credit market, the agents (the tax paying firms) engage in false or sham litigation and deferred tax payments. During the litigation period...

The extent of tax compliance has important implications for revenue yield, efficiency and the fairness of any tax system. Tax evasion undermines revenue collection, distorts competition, and undermines a country's development prospects. In this paper, we investigate whether higher productivity...

With (automatic) exchange of tax information among countries now common, tax evaders have had to find new ways to hide their offshore holdings. One such way are citizenship-by-investment programs, which offer foreigners a new passport for a local investment or a fixed fee. We show analytically...

We consider a world in which countries apply optimal taxes on mobile capital and savings (like in Bucovetsky and Wilson, 1991). Firms and savers may underreport income in order to avoid or evade taxation. We show that, even in the presence of underreporting, the equilibrium under tax competition...

Using a Cournot oligopoly model with an endogenous number of firms and evasion of indirect taxes, this paper shows that more intense competition may have the negative side-effect of eroding tax revenues by increasing tax evasion. This will be the case if market entry costs decrease. A similar...

We explore cheating in a die roll task in response to information about tax evasion in a large-scale experiment on a representative sample of the Italian population. We thus generalise laboratory findings on conditional behaviours (cooperation, cheating) to uncover their real-world bearing in...

We analyze how multinational firms reallocate real operations and debt across their affiliates in response to anti-tax avoidance policies. The UK introduced a worldwide debt cap in 2010, generating a quasi-natural experiment that limited interest deductibility for a group of multinational firms....

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...

Who benefits from the evasion of value added taxes (VAT)? Using a reform that enforced VAT on previously non-compliant large retailers in Armenia, we estimate a one-third passthrough of the tax burden on prices. This suggests that pre-enforcement evasion rents were broadly shared with consumers...