The multinationalization of corporate investment in recent years has given rise to a number of international tax avoidance schemes that may be eroding tax revenues in industrialized countries, but which may also reduce tax burdens on mobile capital and so facilitate investment. Both the welfare...

This report presents and discusses the findings of the "Study to quantify and analyse the VAT Gap in the EU-27 Member States", conducted by CASE and CPB. The main aim of the study was to help better understand the recent trends in the field of VAT fraud and analyse determinants of VAT Gaps using...

The paper empirically analyzes whether electoral rules make legislators differently responsive to changes in fiscal incentives. Key to the analysis are two unique reforms in the German state of Lower Saxony which changed (i) the municipal charter by replacing the council-manager system...

We develop a simple structural model of value added tax (VAT) compliance, and estimate it using widely available national accounts data to learn about compliance in countries where little is currently known. International border controls improve VAT compliance, generating a correlation between...

We develop a theory of cross-border income shifting in response to subnational personal taxation in a federation and examine its implications for the excess burden of personal taxes. We show how a properly-chosen federal tax rate can offset the fiscal externality between states and facilitate...

A simple theory suggests that a common form of federal horizontal equalization grants should cause subnational governments to levy higher tax rates, distorting local tax bases and so increasing federal transfers. To test this, I examine Canadian provincial tax policies in the 1972-2002 period....

The paper empirically analyzes the incentive effects of equalizing transfers on business tax policy by exploiting a natural experiment in the state of Lower Saxony which changed its equalization formula as of 1999. We resort to within-state and across-state difference-indifference estimates to...

We estimate the causal effects of a pandemic-era wage subsidy program in Canada on job losses and business closures. Our estimates use administrative microdata and a regression discontinuity strategy to estimate the effects of marginal changes in the wage subsidy rate. The estimated net wage...

Conventional wisdom has it that proportional representation leads to more coalition governments and so to greater government spending, especially in redistributive categories favoured by special-interest groups. In contrast, we show in a theoretical model that first-past-the-post systems of...

Investors frequently hold equity in tax-exempt savings vehicles such as pension plans, despite the prediction of the standard model that they hold only bonds. We provide a new explanation for this empirical puzzle based on differences between pensions and taxable assets in the tax treatment of...