Tax Evasion and Enforcement Spillovers: Distributional Implications for Developing Economies

减少逃税是一个关键的政策目标，特别是对发展中经济体而言，因为这些经济体的很大一部分经济活动是在官方税收和转移支付系统之外进行的。该项目的首要研究目标是评估如何启动从主要是非正规经济向正规经济的过渡。政策改革，自然实验和准实验变异的独特组合，允许表征这一过渡过程与微观层面的证据对个人纳税人和企业的行为。与此同时，这一背景为评估公共财政中的一些长期问题提供了机会，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价格差异的新调查。本研究的第一部分旨在对针对个人所得税（PIT）制度的微观政策的溢出效应和一般均衡效应进行统一评估。我将量化不同税基的溢出效应，包括增值税（VAT）、企业营业税和个体经营者的个人所得税（PIT），包括密集和广泛的边际，以及正规部门就业反应形式的溢出效应。该项目的第二部分涉及逃税的分配后果，旨在通过对正式-非正式价格差异进行调查，评估逃税的好处如何在经济体中分配。通过借鉴非正规经济规模的其他地方措施，我将评估在（地方）从非正规经济组织向正规经济组织的过渡中是否存在以及如何存在“临界点”。在项目的最后一部分，我将利用一个自然的实验，从根本上改变了法律的避税机会的可用性，以评估纳税人如何看待逃税的成本，通过观察个体之间的替代模式昂贵的真实的反应（可能逃税）和成本较低的避税机会的使用。

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.