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 the relationship between domestic-demand shocks and exports using data for Spanish manufacturing firms in 2002–2013. Exploiting plausibly exogenous geographical variation caused by the Great Recession, we find that firms whose domestic sales declined by more experienced a larger increase in export flows, controlling for firms’ supply determinants. This result illustrates the capacity of export markets to counteract the negative impact of local demand shocks. By structurally estimating a heterogeneous-firm model of exporting with nonconstant marginal costs of production, we conclude that these firm-level responses accounted for half of the spectacular increase in Spanish goods exports over the period 2009–2013.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, Agustín Bénétrix, Barry Eichengreen, Kevin H. O’Rourke and Gisela Rua