The Norwegian Tax Administration operated multi-year random audits of personal income tax returns. We exploit this exceptional randomized setup to estimate the effects of tax audits on future compliance explicitly distinguishing between dynamic responses of compliant and noncompliant audited...

How costly are sovereign debt crises? In this paper we study output losses during sovereign default and debt renegotiation episodes since 1980. In contrast to previous work, we account for the severity of default and not only for its occurrence. Specifically, we distinguish between "hard" and...

Sovereign debt restructurings can be implemented preemptively - prior to a payment default. We code a comprehensive new dataset and find that preemptive restructurings (i) are frequent (38% of all deals 1978-2010), (ii) have lower haircuts, (iii) are quicker to negotiate, and (iv) see lower...

Adding to the literature on the effects of government decentralization, this paper uses a large sample of individual responses from more than a hundred countries about public's perceptions of government's performance along various dimensions to study the relative influences of different types of...

We investigate whether investment incentives work in less developed countries by exploiting the introduction of accelerated depreciation (AD) for fixed asset investment in China as a natural experiment. In contrast to the large positive impact of similar tax incentives in the U.S. and U.K. found...

In 2008 and 2014, the South African Revenue Service (SARS) did snapshot synchronizations of its business tax registry with the country's commercial register in an attempt to identify firms that are non-compliant with their obligation to register with SARS for business tax purposes. We analyse...

This paper analyzes corporate tax-related policies and the difference between them in developed and developing countries. I show that the relationship between financial development and corporate income tax rates as well as the tax administrations' effectiveness follows a U-shaped pattern, a...

Using panel data on the full population of corporate tax returns from Armenia, we study behavioral responses of firms to three size-dependent regulations. We find: i) a strong response to an accounting notch where IFRS becomes mandatory; ii) a moderate response to an administrative notch below...

We study the occurrence of holdout litigation in the context of sovereign defaults. The number of creditor lawsuits against foreign governments has strongly increased over the past decades, but there is a large variation across crisis events. Why are some defaults followed by a "run to the...

The Greek debt restructuring of 2012 stands out in the history of sovereign defaults. It achieved very large debt relief - over 50 per cent of 2012 GDP - with minimal financial disruption, using a combination of new legal techniques, exceptionally large cash incentives, and official sector...