The United States is currently trying to manage a fast-moving public health crisis due to the coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19). The economic and financial ramifications of the outbreak are serious. This Working Paper discusses these ramifications and identifies three interrelated but potentially...

The term “sharing economy” is flawed, but are the alternatives any better? This Essay evaluates the uses of competing narratives to describe the business model employed by firms like Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, and GrubHub. It argues that while the term “sharing economy” may be a misnomer,...

There has been a lot of interest lately in new IRC Section 199A, the new qualified business income (QBI) deduction that grants passthroughs, including qualifying workers who are independent contractors (and not employees), a deduction equal to 20% of a specially calculated base amount of income....

In December 2017, Congress passed major tax reform. The reform included an important new provision that grants independent contractors and other passthrough taxpayers, but not employees or corporations, a potential tax deduction equal to 20% of their qualified business income. Critics have...

Different in more ways than it is possible to easily enumerate, the formation of the United States and the European Union (EU) had a striking similarity of purpose: to increase citizens' welfare by uniting a collection of independent states, each with its own politics, culture, and economy. Of...

This paper analyzes the sources of heterogeneity in legal tax avoidance strategies across individuals. Three conditions are required for a taxpayer to participate in tax avoidance: incentive, access, and awareness. Using rich Swedish administrative panel data with a unique link between corporate...

This paper calculates effective macro-economic tax rates for the 25 EU countries following the methodology developed in Mendoza, Razin, and Tesar (1994). The available Eurostat data allow to compute the tax wedge on consumption, labor and capital. We show that effective tax rates in the 10 new...

This report provides estimates of the VAT Gap for 26 EU Member States for 2012, as well as revised estimates for the period 2009-2011. It is a follow-up to the report "Study to quantify and analyse the VAT Gap in the EU-27 Member States", published in September 2013. This update incorporates the...

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...