The extent of tax compliance has important implications for revenue yield, efficiency and the fairness of any tax system. Tax evasion undermines revenue collection, distorts competition, and undermines a country's development prospects. In this paper, we investigate whether higher productivity...

How can governments reduce the prevalence of cross-border tax fraud? This paper argues that the use of digital technologies offers an opportunity to reduce fraud and increase government revenue. Using data on intra-EU and world trade transactions, we present evidence that (i) cross-border trade...

Using administrative tax records for UK businesses, we document both bunching in annual turnover below the VAT registration threshold and persistent voluntary registration by almost half of the firms below the threshold. We develop a conceptual framework that can simultaneously explain these two...

A growing empirical literature has documented significant profit shifting activities by multinationals. This paper looks at the impact of such profit shifting on real activity and tax competition. Real activity can be affected as profit shifting changes-and theoretically most likely reduces-the...

This paper reviews the rapidly growing empirical literature on international tax avoidance by multinational corporations. It surveys evidence on main channels of corporate tax avoidance including transfer mispricing, international debt shifting, treaty shopping, tax deferral and corporate...

International corporate tax issues are now prominent in public debate, most notably with the current G20-OECD project addressing Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (‘BEPS'). But, while there is considerable empirical evidence for advanced countries on the cross-country fiscal externalities at...

This paper examines the drivers, and reestimates the size of shadow economies in Europe, with a focus on the emerging economies, and recommends policies to increase formality. The size of shadow economies declined across Europe in recent years but remains significant, especially in Eastern...

We undertake an extended discussion of the latest developments about the existing and new estimation methods of the shadow economy. New results on the shadow economy for 158 countries all over the world are presented over 1991 to 2015. Strengths and weaknesses of these methods are assessed and a...

This paper is the first attempt to directly explore the long-run nonlinear relationship between theshadow economy and level of development. Using a dataset of 158 countries over the period from1996 to 2015, our results reveal a robust U-shaped relationship between the shadow economy sizeand GDP...

Worldwide protests against the perceived lack of economic opportunity and failure of governance have refocused attention on the need for inclusive growth and strong institutions. In developing countries, large informal economies limit state capacity to deliver governance and strong institutions,...