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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.

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.

The Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Credit Crisis of the 2000s had similar causes but elicited strikingly different policy responses. While it remains too early to assess the effectiveness of current policy, it is possible to analyse monetary and fiscal responses in the 1930s as a natural experiment or counterfactual capable of shedding light on the impact of current policies. We employ vector autoregressions, instrumental variables, and qualitative evidence for 27 countries in the period 1925–39. The results suggest that monetary and fiscal stimulus was effective -- that where it did not make a difference it was not tried. They shed light on the debate over fiscal multipliers in episodes of financial crisis. They are consistent with multipliers at the higher end of those estimated in the recent literature, and with the argument that the impact of fiscal stimulus will be greater when banking systems are dysfunctional and monetary policy is constrained by the zero bound. — Miguel Almunia, Agustin Benetrix, Barry Eichengreen, Kevin H. O’Rourke and Gisela Rua

This paper investigates the effects of monitoring the information trails generated by firms’ activities in order to improve tax compliance. We use quasi-experimental variation provided by a Large Taxpayers Unit (LTU) in Spain to empirically test the theoretical predictions on firms’ responses to an increase in monitoring effort. Firms with more than €6 million in reported revenue are monitored by the LTU, which devotes more resources to verifying the transactions reported by those firms. Using financial statements from practically the entire universe of Spanish firms for the period 1999-2007, we find substantial bunching of firms just below the LTU threshold. On average, we estimate that bunchers reduce their reported revenue by €101,000 (1.7% of total revenue) to avoid falling in the high enforcement regime. Adjusting for resource costs of evasion faced by firms, we estimate that the marginal bunching firm reduces its reported revenue by up to €593,000 (9.9%). The response is weak in sectors where most sales are made to final consumers (retail, restaurants) and strong in sectors where firms sell intermediate goods to other businesses (wholesale, manufacturing). This result suggests that the monitoring effort by the tax authorities and the traceability of the information reported by firms are complements, and both are necessary for effective tax enforcement. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that firms under low monitoring effort also misreport their material and labour expenditures to evade taxes, even in the presence of third-party reporting.

This paper analyzes the gender distribution of research fields in economics based on a new dataset of almost 1,900 researchers affiliated to top-50 economics departments in 2005, as ranked by Econphd.net website. We document that women are unevenly distributed across fields and test some behavioral implications from theories underlying such disparities. Our main findings are that the probability that a woman works on a given field is positively related to the share of women already working on that field (path-dependence), and that this phenomenon is better explained by women avoiding male-dominated fields than by men avoiding female dominated fields. This pattern, however, is weaker for younger female researchers who spread more evenly across fields.

This paper describes the gender distribution of research fields in economics by means of a new dataset about researchers working in the world top-50 Economics departments, according to the rankings of the Econphd.net website. We document that women are unevenly distributed across fields and test some behavioral implications from theories underlying such disparities. Our main findings are that the probability that a woman works in a given field is positively related to the share of women in that field (path-dependence), and that the share of women in a field decreases with their average quality. These patterns, however, are weaker for younger female researchers. Further, we document how gender segregation of fields has evolved over different Ph.D. cohorts.

This paper estimates the effects of tax incentives on charitable contributions in the UK, using the universe of self-assessment income tax returns between 2005 and 2013. We exploit variation from a large reform in 2010 to estimate intensive- and extensive-margin tax-price elasticities of giving. Using a predicted-tax-rate instrument for the price of giving relative to consumption, we find an intensive-margin elasticity of about − 0.2 and an extensive-margin elasticity of − 0.1, yielding a total elasticity of about − 0.3. To further explore the extensive-margin response, we propose a model with a fixed cost of declaring donations and obtain a structural estimate of that cost of around £47. We also study the welfare effects of tax incentives, extending the theoretical literature to allow for extensive-margin giving and for a fixed cost of declaring donations. Taking into account these factors, there is a case for increasing the subsidy on charitable giving in the UK.