Tax administrations use machine learning to predict risk scores as a basis for selecting individual taxpayers for audit. Audits detect noncompliance immediately, but may also alter future filing behavior. This analysis is the first to estimate compliance effects of audits among high-risk wage...

We introduce a new dataset that includes quantitative harmonized indices of tax reforms based on qualitative information of about 900 Economic Surveys from the OECD and 37,000 tax-related news from the IBFD archives. The data set provides indicators on tax reforms for tax rates and tax bases,...

In this paper, we disentangle tax revenue forecast errors into influences stemming from wrong macroeconomic assumptions and false predictions of the elasticities linking the tax base to its corresponding tax type. Across six tax types and the overall tax sum for Germany, we find a heterogeneous...

While corporate tax rates in OECD countries declined over the last decades, revenues from corporate taxation relative to GDP remained remarkably stable. This paper uses a comprehensive firm-level dataset to provide an explanation for this rate-revenue puzzle in corporate taxation. Focusing on...

We estimate the corporate elasticity of taxable income. Our analysis draws on panel variation in the decentralized system of corporate taxation in Switzerland. We find that an increase in a jurisdiction's corporate net-of-tax rate by 1% results in an increase in aggregate corporate income by...

This paper analyzes the relevance of firm losses for tax revenues and welfare when switching from separate accounting to a system of tax base consolidation with formula apportionment. We find that a system change unambiguously decreases tax revenues in the short run, in which neither firms nor...

This paper considers the welfare implications of a tax on real estate transfers. A theoretical analysis shows how the discouragement of mutually beneficial transactions as well as tax-sheltering activities give rise to a welfare loss that can be estimated comprehensively from the empirical...

Vertical externalities, changes in one level of government’s policies that affect the budget of another level of government, may lead to non-optimal government policies. These externalities are associated with tax bases that are shared or "co-occupied" by two levels of government. Here I...

This paper investigates how tax revenue elasticities develop with respect to their tax base and analyses the specific impact of the business cycle. The main novelty of the paper is to use revenue data net of discretionary tax measures. Based on an EU country panel for the period 2001-13, we...

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...