Modern tax administrations seek to optimize tax collections while minimizing administration costs and taxpayer compliance costs. Experience shows that voluntary compliance is best achieved through a system of self-assessment. Many tax administrations have introduced self-assessment principles in...

The benchmark optimal income taxation model of Mirrlees (1971) finds that the optimal marginal income tax rate (MIT) is always non-negative. A key model assumption is the coincidence between social and individual work preferences. This paper extends the model to allow for differences in social...

Personal Income Tax (PIT) is one of the key sources of revenues in Advanced Economies (AEs) but plays a much more limited role in Low-Income Developing Countries (LIDCs) and Emerging Market Economies (EMEs), both in terms of revenue and redistributive impact. Notwithstanding, this paper shows...

Invoices document economic transactions and are thus critical to assess tax liabilities. We study a reform in the Dominican Republic that aimed to integrate invoice management into a broader, more comprehensive, risk-based compliance strategy. By rationing authorized invoices based on an extra...

Personal income taxes (PITs) play little or no role in the Middle East and North Africa, often yielding less than 2 percent of GDP in revenue—with the exception of few North African countries. This paper examines how PITs have evolved in recent decades, and what they might look like in the...

This paper examines the constraints that negative externalities (i.e., smuggling from a large neighbor) impose on the application of automatic fuel price adjustment mechanisms. It is often recommended to establish an automatic price adjustment mechanism to reduce fuel subsidy expenditures, but...

This paper examines how labor taxation (personal income taxes and social security contributions) in the Western Balkan contributes to labor market outcomes such as high informality and a significant gender gap in participation rates. We find that limited progressivity combined with high tax...

In contrast to most Scandinavian countries, Iceland allocates the income of closely held businesses (CHBs) between capital and labor based on administratively set minimum wages rather than an imputed return to book assets. This paper contrasts the relative tax burdens of the current minimum wage...

This paper discusses how the structure of the tax system affects its progressivity. It suggests a measure of progressive capacity of tax systems, based on the Kakwani index, but independent of pre-tax income distributions. Using this and other progressivity measures, the paper (i) documents a...

This paper provides a quantitative evaluation of the macroeconomic, distributional, and fiscal effects of three reform proposals for Germany: i) a reduction in the social security tax in the low-wage sector, ii) a publicly financed expansion of full-day child care and full-day schooling, and...