This paper investigates how tax rates and tax enforcement jointly impact fiscal capacity in low-income countries. We study a policy experiment in the D.R. Congo that randomly assigned 38,028 property owners to the status quo tax rate or to a rate reduction. This variation in tax liabilities...

In the context of collecting property taxes from 13432 households in a district of Lima (Peru), we investigate whether prioritized enforcement can improve the effective use of limited enforcement capacity. We randomly assign households to two treatment arms: one replicating the city's usual...

In the second half of the 2010s more than 100 countries--including all large offshore financial centers--started to automatically exchange bank information with foreign tax authorities. This informational big-bang marks a break with the situation of offshore bank secrecy that prevailed before....

Governments frequently use proxies for deservingness--tags--to implement progressive tax and transfer policies. These proxies are often imperfect, leading to misclassification and inequities among equally deserving individuals. This paper studies the efficiency effects of such misclassification...

This paper investigates the impact of a progressive tax reform on tax compliance. We leverage a major progressive tax reform in a large Argentine municipality. First, we use a quasi-experimental design to estimate the causal effect of changes in a household's own tax rates on its tax compliance....

The OECD has promoted the adoption of internationally standardized transfer pricing rules to curb profit shifting for tax avoidance by multinational firms. Bustos et al. (2023) analyzed a large reform in Chile based on these OECD standards and found that it led to a surge in tax advisory...

We use administrative corporate tax data from the IRS to study a particular form of tax avoidance for US multinational corporations (MNCs). This strategy relies on cost sharing agreements (CSAs), which govern joint R&D efforts conducted with foreign affiliates and allow US MNCs to shift profits...

Evasion is a key obstacle to raising customs revenue. We study how improved administrative capacity enables governments to combat evasion by redesigning tariff codes. Using newly compiled historical records from the Early American Republic, we show that as Customs administration matured, the...

We study the extent to which ML techniques can be used to improve tax auditing efficiency using administrative data, without the need of randomized audits. Using Italy's population data on sole proprietorship tax returns, audits and their outcome, we develop a new approach to address the so...

Profit shifting by multinational corporations is thought to reduce tax revenue around the world. We analyze the introduction of standard regulations aimed at limiting profit shifting. Using administrative tax and customs data from Chile in difference-in-differences event-study designs, we find...