Improving tax collection is essential if developing economies are to avoid over-reliance on external donor funds and loans. Revenue authorities in the Global South have recently adopted new policy tools to improve domestic revenue mobilization through taxes. One such new policy is a withholding...

South Africa's Employment Tax Incentive, launched in 2014, aimed to address low youth employment by reducing the cost of hiring young workers. We make use of anonymized tax administrative data from the 2012-2015 tax years to examine the effect of the Incentive on youth employment. We match firms...

Nowadays, tax depreciation allowances are used less as instruments of macroeconomic stabilization and more as long-term measures to stimulate investment. This paper tabulates the types of accelerated depreciation allowances in South Africa and calculates the magnitude of these benefits in...

We present new evidence on the effects of South Africa's Employment Tax Incentive (ETI), a hiring and employment wage subsidy aimed at reducing youth unemployment. We show that attempts to estimate firm-level treatment effects via conditional difference-in-differences are likely to fail when...

Assessing tax gaps-the difference between the potential and actual taxes raised-plays a vital role in achieving positive domestic revenue objectives through improved and reformed taxation. This is particularly pertinent for growth outcomes in developing countries. This study uses a bottom-up...

In this paper we study the effects of various tax schedule discontinuities on the behavior of small firms using high-quality and population-wide tax register data from South Africa. We use the bunching method to analyse how these discontinuities affect the firm-size distribution. We first...

The problem of debt bias can be tackled through either disincentivizing the use of debt financing or incentivizing the use of equity financing. Considering the South African context - in which many firms are highly leveraged and the marginal effective tax rates for using debt financing are...

In this paper we use the new Government Revenue Dataset to analyse fiscal decentralization. We find that developed countries are on average more decentralized than developing countries and that Asia, Europe and North America are among the most fiscally decentralized regions. In our econometric...

The United Kingdom's (UK) property markets are thought to be a common destination for corrupt and criminal assets and money laundering, with investment often through offshore shell companies. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we study the impact of the introduction of a policy...