The increasing divorce rate has become a major social concern for policy makers in the Islamic government of Iran. The price of gold coin is an important factor in cost-benefit analysis for individuals in their marriage and divorce decisions in Iran. Dowries (Mehrieh) are usually in the form of...

This paper provides a comprehensive empirical assessment of the relation between the cyclicality of fiscal policy, output volatility, and economic growth, using a large cross-section of 88 countries over the period 1960 to 2004. Identification of the effects of (endogenous) cyclical fiscal...

One of the leading methods of estimating the structural parameters of DSGE models is the VAR-based impulse response matching estimator. The existing asymptotic theory for this estimator does not cover situations in which the number of impulse response parameters exceeds the number of VAR model...

Farmers are often exempted from VAT for administrative and political reasons. But this means that the VAT on their inputs cannot be ‘washed out' through the tax deduction/credit mechanism. To compensate farmers for the uncompensated VAT on inputs, the EU has devised a flat-rate scheme that...

In 2018, the European Council and the UK and Spanish governments each proposed to introduce a Digital Services Tax (DST), to be levied on the revenue of large digital platform companies earned from advertising, online intermediation, and/or the transmission of data. We offer a rationalization of...

There is only limited evidence of how small firms respond to size-based regulations applied in various countries. We study this question by examining the value-added tax (VAT) threshold in Finland. We find sizable bunching of firms in the sales distribution just below the exemption threshold,...

This paper estimates the pass through of VAT changes to consumer prices, using a unique dataset providing disaggregated, monthly data on prices and VAT rates for 17 Eurozone countries over 1999-2013. Pass through is much less than full on average, and differs markedly across types of VAT change....

We develop a conceptual framework which captures the effect of the VAT system on profit by two effective taxes. This allows (i) predictions of the determinants of voluntary registration and bunching at the registration threshold; (ii) develops a formula for estimating the elasticity of...

State borders create a discontinuous tax treatment of retail sales. In a Nash game, local tax rates will be higher on the low-state-tax side of a border. Local taxes will decrease from the nearest high-tax border and increase from the low-tax border. Using driving time from state borders and all...

Several African countries have to increase their tax revenues to finance human and economic development. General consumption taxes, such as VATs, are the preferred instrument for doing so, because they are less detrimental to growth than income taxes. To enable their use, VAT design has to be...