This paper calculates automatic stabilization in Ghana, South Africa, and Ecuador to explain income cushioning amid income and demand shocks. Fiscal policies within these countries are also stress tested to gauge welfare contingencies and insurance. A discretionary action approach is adopted for...

The author applies the bunching methodology to South African administrative tax data over the period from 2011 to 2017 to investigate the responsiveness of individual taxpayers to changes in marginal personal income tax rates. She finds significant evidence of bunching among the self-employed...

A key policy problem in most developing countries is the size of the informal sector and its persistence over time. In need to increase their tax revenues, policy makers face a trade-off between decreasing tax rates (making formalizing potentially more attractive) and alternatively raising tax...

The level of income can be directly inferred from the level of education, making education an important variable as a key determinant of better livelihoods and poverty alleviation. However, in most developing countries education is not accessible to all. In Ghana - although basic education is...

The elasticity of taxable income is a key tax policy parameter that plays an important role in the formulation of tax and transfer policy. This paper extends work by Kemp (2019) by using a new panel of individual tax returns and the phenomenon of 'bracket creep' to produce updated estimates of...

Our paper investigates the implications of asymmetric non-tax revenue information for tax morale using micro data from thirty-six African countries. We utilize a model in which agents form their perceptions about the sufficiency of government non-tax revenue for development financing under...

A large informal sector is a challenge for developing countries building up social protection systems. Expanding social safety nets reduces poverty, but financing them can increase the tax burden, potentially reducing availability of formal sector jobs. This paper quantifies impacts on income...

This paper studies the distribution of resources within Albanian families in 2012 using a collective consumption model with two alternative specifications: the first enables the estimation of intrahousehold distribution of resources among male adults, female adults and children; the second...

Rising levels of income inequality and tight government budgets have spurred discussions in many developing nations about how to appropriately tax high-income earners. In this paper, we study taxpayer responses to an increase in the top marginal tax rate in South Africa, drawing on exceptionally...

We investigate the behavioural responses of individual taxpayers to changes in marginal personal income tax rates applying empirical bunching methodology to tax administrative data from Zambia over the period from 2014 to 2021. We find evidence for excess bunching at the first kink in the tax...