We use a new firm-level dataset to examine the efficiency of investment in emerging economies. In the three-year period following stock market liberalizations, the growth rate of the typical firm's capital stock exceeds its pre-liberalization mean by an average of 5.4 percentage points....

We examine the economies of density associated with the expansion of Amazon's distribution network from 2006 to 2018. We demonstrate that, in placing a fulfillment center in a new state, Amazon faces a trade-off between the revenue implications of exposing local customers to sales tax on their...

We incorporate the lumpy nature of firm-level investment into the study of how tax policy affects investment behavior. We show that tax policies can directly impact the lumpiness of investment. Extensive-margin responses to tax policy are key to understanding the effects of different tax reforms...

Unconventional fiscal policy uses announcements of future increases in consumption taxes to generate inflation expectations and accelerate consumption expenditure. It is budget neutral and time consistent. We exploit a unique natural experiment for an empirical test of the effectiveness of...

This paper uses all Value Added Tax (VAT) changes across all EU Member States from 1988 to 2016 to estimate the effect of VATs on trade flows. We find small elasticities of trade flows with respect to VATs, in spite of some of the VAT changes being substantial. We estimate substantially smaller...

When regions in close proximity have different tax rates, residents may engage in cross-border shopping and take advantage of tax differentials. The extent of this activity can be captured by the tax elasticity of border sales (TEBS). We collect 749 estimates of TEBS reported in 60 studies, and...

We use novel transaction-level card expenditure data to estimate the effect of the temporary value-added tax (VAT) cut in Germany 2020. We find that the annualized growth rate of expenditures for durables increased by 6 percentage points (pp) during the tax cut, with a particularly strong...