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El 1 de enero de 2023 el gobierno español redujo el IVA de los alimentos de primera necesidad del 4% al 0%; y otros alimentos básicos pasaron del 10% al 5%. A diferencia de lo que ha ocurrido en otros países, la rebaja del IVA se trasladó en su inmensa mayoría a los precios finales entre enero y febrero, al menos en las grandes superficies. Ahora bien, la medida resultó costosa e ineficiente: destinó un mayor gasto público agregado (en € que se dejan de ingresar por IVA) para las familias de más renta. Cinco de cada diez euros que se dejaron de recaudar fueron a parar al 40% de hogares con mayor capacidad económica. Como la evidencia muestra de forma sistemática, las políticas focalizadas de transferencias a hogares de renta baja suelen ser más efectivas desde el punto de vista distributivo, y más baratas, aunque presenten más dificultades de implementación.

En este articulo utilizamos variacion geografica plausiblemente exogena en la reduccion de la demanda interna causada por la Gran Recesion en Espana para documentar la existencia de una robusta relacion causal negativa a nivel de empresa entre cambios provocados por la demanda en las ventas internas y en los flujos de exportaciones. Las empresas manufactureras espanolas cuyas ventas internas se redujeron en mayor medida durante la crisis experimentaron un mayor incremento en sus flujos de exportacion, incluso una vez que se controla por sus determinantes de oferta, tales como sus costes laborales. Esta relacion negativa entre cambios en las ventas internas y cambios en los flujos de exportacion provocados por cambios de la demanda ilustra la capacidad de los mercados de exportacion para compensar el impacto negativo de shocks de demanda locales. Los resultados presentados en el articulo se racionalizan a traves de un modelo estandar de exportaciones con heterogeneidad de empresas que permite la existencia de costes marginales de produccion no constantes. Utilizando una version de este modelo estimada de manera estructural, concluimos que las respuestas a nivel de empresa a la caida de la demanda interna en Espana podrian explicar alrededor de la mitad del espectacular incremento de las exportaciones de bienes en Espana (el denominado «milagro exportador espanol») en el periodo 2009-2013.

Los países de nuestro entorno han dado pasos importantes para gestionar y facilitar el acceso a la ingente cantidad de datos que generan y recopilan las Administraciones públicas, lo que supone una oportunidad para mejorar la evaluación de las políticas públicas, promover que el diseño de nuevas políticas se base en la evidencia disponible y expandir el conocimiento científico utilizando los registros administrativos. Sin embargo, a pesar de algunas iniciativas aisladas recientes, España se está quedando rezagada. A partir del análisis comparado de la experiencia en otros países avanzados y destacando las ventajas e inconvenientes de las distintas opciones que tenemos, planteamos propuestas de mejora en el acceso a datos administrativos en España con el fin de aprovechar el potencial de los datos existentes para impulsar las políticas basadas en la evidencia científica.

Are firms sophisticated maximizers, or do they consistently make errors? Using transaction-level data from Ugandan value-added tax (VAT) returns, we show that sellers and buyers report different amounts 79% of the time, despite invoices being easily cross-checked. We estimate that 25% of firms are disadvantageous misreporters-they systematically misreport own sales and purchases such that their tax liability increases-while 75% are advantageous misreporters. Many firms-especially disadvantageous misreporters-fail to report imported inputs they themselves reported at Customs, increasing their VAT liability. On net, unilateral VAT misreporting cost Uganda about US$384 million in foregone 2013-2016 tax revenue.

We study how taxable income responds to changes in marginal tax rates, using as a main source of identifying variation three large reforms to the Spanish personal income tax implemented in the period 1999–2014. The most reliable estimates of the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) with respect to the net-of-tax rate for this period are between 0.45 and 0.64. The ETI is about three times larger for self-employed taxpayers than for employees and larger for business income than for labor and capital income. The elasticity of broad income is smaller, between 0.10 and 0.24, while the elasticity of some tax deductions such as the one for private pension contributions exceeds one. Our estimates are similar across a variety of estimation methods and sample restrictions and also robust to potential biases created by mean reversion and heterogeneous income trends.

Are firms sophisticated maximizers, or do they appear to make mistakes? Using transactions data from Ugandan value-added tax returns, we show that sellers and buyers report different amounts 79% of the time, despite invoices being easily cross-checked. Our estimates suggest that most firms are “advantageous misreporters“, but that 25% are “disadvantageous misreporters” who systematically overreport own sales minus purchases such that their tax liability increases. Similarly, many firms—especially disadvantageous misreporters—fail to VAT-report imported inputs they themselves reported at Customs, increasing their liability. On net, unilateral VAT misreporting cost Uganda about US$384 million in foregone 2013-2016 tax revenue.

This paper analyzes the effects of size-dependent tax enforcement on firms’ tax compliance. We exploit quasi-experimental variation generated by a Large Taxpayers Unit (LTU) in Spain, which monitors firms with more than €6 million in reported revenue. Firms strategically bunch below the eligibility threshold in order to avoid stricter tax enforcement. The response is stronger in sectors where transactions leave more paper trail, suggesting that monitoring effort and the traceability of information reported by firms are complements. We estimate that there would be substantial welfare gains from extending stricter tax monitoring to smaller businesses. (JEL H25, H26, H32, L25)

Using administrative tax records for U.K. businesses, we document both bunching in annual turnover below the VAT registration threshold and persistent voluntary registration by almost half of the firms below the threshold. We develop a conceptual framework that can simultaneously explain these two apparently conflicting facts. The framework also predicts that higher intermediate input shares, lower product-market competition, and a lower share of business to consumer sales lead to voluntary registration. The predictions are exactly the opposite for bunching. We test the theory using linked VAT and corporation tax records from 2004 to 2014, finding empirical support for these predictions.

We discuss typical issues in getting access to and using high-quality administrative tax data for research purposes. We discuss research involving both quasi- and field experiments implemented together with the tax authority. We reflect on practical solutions that promote co-creation of knowledge and reduce information asymmetries between researchers and practitioners, based on our experiences of working with the tax authorities in Finland and the UK. We provide examples of how to improve the overall research environment focusing on two successful case studies: the HMRC Datalab in the UK and the remote access to data from Statistics Finland. We propose two key arguments to persuade policymakers elsewhere to follow similar practices: improved data security and equality of access across researchers.

The availability of a firm-level database that represents the productive sector of an economy at the aggregate level is a necessary condition to undertake both reliable policy analysis and economic research in multiple areas. In this paper, we document the construction of a new representative firm-level dataset for Spain using detailed micro-level information provided by firms to the Spanish Commercial Registry and the Bank of Spain. A comparison with National Accounts figures serves to illustrate that the new micro-dataset is able to replicate the growth rates of output, employment and wage bill of the private sector. Using official statistics from the National Institute of Statistics (INE), we show that the resulting dataset covers more than 80% of firms registered in the census over the years 2000-2013 and, more importantly, the resulting dataset replicates the firm size distribution of the Spanish non-financial market economy. The same representativeness analysis is done for the manufacturing sector indicating that this sector is particularly well-represented in the dataset.

This paper estimates the intensive and extensive-margin tax-price elasticities of giving using UK administrative tax return data, exploiting variation from a large tax reform. Using a variety of estimation methods and new instruments for the tax-price of giving, we find an intensive-margin elasticity of about -0.25 and an extensive-margin elasticity of -0.1, yielding a total elasticity of about -0.35. These estimates mask considerable heterogeneity: high-income individuals respond more on the intensive margin, while the extensive-margin response is stronger for low-income taxpayers. We then derive new conditions to evaluate the welfare consequences of changes in the subsidy to donations. This analysis shows that these elasticities can only be rationalized as being optimal if the UK government places a large enough value on providing warm-glow opportunities for UK donors.

We exploit plausibly exogenous geographical variation in the reduction in domestic demand caused by the Great Recession in Spain to document the existence of a robust, within-firm negative causal relationship between demand-driven changes in domestic sales and export flows. Spanish manufacturing firms whose domestic sales were reduced by more during the crisis observed a larger increase in their export flows, even after controlling for firms' supply determinants (such as labor costs). This negative relationship between demand-driven changes in domestic sales and changes in export flows illustrates the capacity of export markets to counteract the negative impact of local demand shocks. We rationalize our findings through a standard heterogeneous-firm model of exporting expanded to allow for non-constant marginal costs of production. Using a structurally estimated version of this model, we conclude that the firm-level responses to the slump in domestic demand in Spain could well have accounted for around one-half of the spectacular increase in Spanish goods exports (the so-called `Spanish export miracle') over the period 2009-13.

Programa de Doctorado en Economía por la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Presidente: Miguel Almunia Candela.- Secretaria: Nuarpear Lekfuangfu.- Vocal: Effrosyni Adamopoulou