Peru has made great progress in reducing poverty and inequality in the past decade alongside high economic growth. Albeit this progress, the incidence of poverty and inequality remain high. This paper examines the distributional and poverty impact of the public tax and transfer system in Peru....

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 onethird passthrough of the tax burden on prices. This suggests that pre-enforcement evasion rents were broadly shared with consumers...

We empirically investigate the distributional consequences of the Riester scheme, the main private pension subsidization program in Germany. We find that 38% of the aggregate subsidy accrues to the top two deciles of the population, but only 7.3% to the bottom two. Nonetheless the Riester scheme...

A popular argument for a federal minimum wage is that it will prevent in-work poverty and reduce income inequality. We examine this assertion for Germany, a welfare state with a relative generous means-tested social minimum and high marginal tax rates. Our analysis is based on a microsimulation...

Commodity taxes play an important role in Brazil and raise around 60% of the total tax revenue. This heavy reliance renders commodity taxation one of the main tools available to the government for collecting revenue and securing redistribution. In fact, Brazilian income inequity is one of the...

This paper estimates income tax underreporting for the case of Germany, by income category and along the income distribution. Comparing weighted samples of survey and tax data, we find patterns that are in line with the literature: Average income from self-employment and from rent and lease in...

Im deutschen Einkommensteuersystem wird Ersparnisbildung in Kapitallebensversicherungen durch die Absetzbarkeit der Versicherungsprämien bei der Ermittlung des zu versteuernden Einkommens und durch die Steuerfreiheit der Endausschüttung begünstigt. Die daraus resultierende Steuerersparnis ist...