Tax Evasion and Enforcement Spillovers: Distributional Implications for Developing Economies

减少逃税是一项关键的政策目标，特别是对发展中经济体而言，因为在这些经济体中，很大一部分经济活动是在官方税收和转移系统之外运作的。该项目的主要研究目标是评估如何启动从以非正规为主的经济向正规经济的过渡。政策改革、自然实验和准实验变化的独特组合，使我们能够用关于个人纳税人和公司行为的微观证据来描述这一转变过程。与此同时，这一背景提供了评估公共财政中一些长期存在的问题的机会，其中包括逃税的分配影响、特定税收形式对各种不同税基的溢出效应以及对税收的行为反应。这项研究利用了厄瓜多尔详细的行政登记数据，并辅之以一项关于企业正式和非正式销售之间的价格差异的新调查。本研究项目的第一部分旨在对针对个人所得税制度的微观导向政策的溢出效应和一般均衡影响进行统一评估。我将量化不同税基的溢出效应，包括增值税(VAT)、企业营业税和个体户税负，包括密集和广泛的边际效应，以及以正规部门就业反应的形式产生的溢出效应。该项目的第二部分涉及逃税的分配后果，旨在通过对正式和非正式的价格分散进行调查，评估逃税的好处是如何在经济中分配的。通过借鉴当地衡量非正规经济规模的额外措施，我将评估在(当地)从非正式经济组织向正式经济组织的转变过程中是否以及如何存在“临界点”。在项目的最后部分，我将利用一个从根本上改变合法避税机会可获得性的自然实验，通过观察代价高昂的真实反应(可能是逃税)和成本较低的避税机会使用之间的个体替代模式，来评估纳税人如何感知逃税成本。

Reducing tax evasion is a key policy goal, in particular for developing economies, where a large share of the economic activity operates outside of the official tax and transfer system. The overarching research objective of this project is to assess how to initiate the transition from a predominantly informal to a formal economy. A unique combination of policy reforms, natural experiments and quasi-experimental variation allows to characterize this transition process with micro-level evidence on the behavior of individual taxpayers and firms. At the same time, the setting provides the opportunity to assess a number of long-standing issues in public finance, among them the distributional impacts of tax evasion, the spillover effects of a given tax form on various different tax bases, and behavioral responses to taxation. The study draws on detailed administrative register data from Ecuador, complemented by a novel survey on price dispersion between formal and informal sales of businesses. A first part of this research project aims to provide a unified assessment of the spillover and general equilibrium effects of a micro-oriented policy targeting the personal income tax (PIT) system. I will quantify spillovers on different tax bases, including the value-added tax (VAT), corporate business tax, and PIT of self-employed, both at the intensive and extensive margin, as well as spillovers in the form of formal-sector employment responses. The second part of the project deals with the distributional consequences of tax evasion and aims to assess how the benefits of evasion are distributed among the economy by conducting a survey of formal-informal price dispersions. By drawing on additional local measures of the size of the informal economy, I will assess whether and how there are “tipping points” in the (local) transition from an informal to a formal organization of the economy. In the last part of the project, I will exploit a natural experiment radically changing the availability of legal tax avoidance opportunities to assess how taxpayers perceive the costs of tax evasion by observing individual substitution patterns between costly real responses (possibly evasion) and less costly use of avoidance opportunities.