The study examines the shift in taxation of open-ended fixed-income funds in Brazil from a realization basis to an accrual basis (locally known as come-cotas), which was introduced in 1998 and more recently extended to include private closed-end funds and offshore trusts through the enactment of...

This note examines the effective income tax rates of top earners in Honduras, using a novel approach that links personal and corporate income tax data. This comprehensive income measure, achieved through collaboration with the Honduras Tax Authority (SAR), reveals a crucial link between the...

South Africa is one of the most unequal economies globally. In this paper, we examine the design of its personal income tax (PIT), with a focus on its redistributive function. We apply the Pfähler decomposition method to analyse the redistributive effects of key components of the South African...

We propose a new approach to assess the impact of regulatory changes on the production sector such as competition policies, taxing intermediate goods, robots or AI, trade regulation, production of public firms or environmental standards for firms. Our framework covers multidimensional nonlinear...

In this paper, we investigate the effect of higher personal income taxes on CEO and firm performance in publicly traded US firms. In response to higher taxes on compensation, CEOs are less likely to reach performance goals and spend more time working in boards outside of their firm. At the same...

This report presents results on a review of data available to the State Revenue Committee for estimating the Personal Income Tax and Social Security Contribution gaps. It is concluded that SRC has sufficient quality data available from operational audits to assess the gaps

Joint taxation of married couples represents a puzzle for welfare economics. We investigate whether political economy forces can explain its persistence. We develop sufficient statistics to determine whether a reform towards individual taxation would garner majority support and apply this...

The Scottish Government has a range of tax powers at its disposal, which it has used in recent years to forge an increasingly distinct tax policy from the rest of the UK. In its 2025-26 Budget, the Scottish Government made a number of tax policy changes, including to income tax, business rates,...

Is charitable giving politically motivated? This article uses exhaustive administrative household panel data and a natural experiment to investigate the giving behavior of wealthy households and quantify their preferences for charitable and political donations. Our dataset includes all the...

We use variation in marginal tax rates and in tax bracket thresholds at which they apply in order to identify the substitution and income effects of tax reforms. We use a triple-difference estimator that exploits variation from subnational tax reforms, for which behavioral responses to taxes are...

An often neglected implication of couple taxation is its impact on marital sorting. A tractable model of such an impact is offered in this paper. It reveals that, as compared to joint taxation with income splitting, individual taxation makes higher-ability individuals more picky in the marriage...

We adopted an empirical approach to capture the macroeconomic impact of tax changes for the examined period from 1974 to 2018. It is generally accepted that vector autoregression model (VAR) has proven useful for describing the dynamic interrelationships of multivariate series. Our empirical...

Die Studie untersucht den Beitrag der unterschiedlichen Einkommensarten, insbesondere der Einkommen aus unselbständiger Beschäftigung zur Finanzierung der öffentlichen Haushalte im Jahr 2019. Neben dem typischerweise dargestellten Aufkommen aus direkten Abgaben (Sozialbeiträge und...

Flat tax systems have gained traction in countries that transitioned from socialism, with more than 20 nations in Eastern Europe and Central Asia adopting such systems since the mid-1990s. These reforms aimed to streamline tax processes, enhance compliance, and boost economic growth. While...

This report provides analysis and advice on tax policy and administration reforms to modernize and improve the income and consumption tax system. On consumption taxes, the key recommendation is to replace the current system that is based on import tariffs, a business turnover tax, and local...

We analyze the optimal nonlinear income tax schedule for taxpayers with multiple incomes and multiple unobserved characteristics. We identify smoothness assumptions and extensions of the single crossing conditions that enable the characterization of the optimum through variational calculus. Both...

Individuals vary considerably in how much they earn during their lifetimes. This study examines the role of the tax‐and‐transfer system in mitigating such inequalities, which could otherwise lead to disparities in living standards. Utilizing a life‐cycle model, we determine that the...

We estimate the effects of personal income tax decreases on financial well-being, including qualitative subjective assessments and quantitative measures. A plausibly causal design shows that tax decreases in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made survey respondents more likely to say they were “living...

Public disclosure laws on politicians' outside income aim to enhance electoral accountability, but their effects remain unclear and may backfire. Using a German disclosure reform, administrative tax data, and a difference-in-difference design, we show that MPs increased their outside income...

Tax administrations increasingly use audits via mail (correspondence audits) to audit taxpayers. Correspondence audits are cheaper than face-to-face audits but their effects on compliance are unclear. We investigate the effects of correspondence and face-to-face audits on post-audit tax...

This paper tests whether partially unemployed workers value future preserved benefits when they bunch at the kink of the unemployment insurance benefit-withdrawal schedule. I extend the bunching formula of Saez (2010) to a dynamic setting that accounts for the value of future benefits tied to...

Tax expenditures are tax relief measures targeted at some socially desirable activities or specific groups of taxpayers. This paper reviews issues related to tax expenditures in the EU and presents some stylised facts related to tax expenditures in personal income taxation (PIT), value-added...

How well raising tax rates can succeed for an economy intent on increasing tax revenue and narrowing the tax-to-GDP-ratio gap with other economies depends on its ability to meet certain conditions. This paper investigates these conditions and demonstrates that expanding the tax base as a...

At the fourteenth session of the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, just weeks before the onset of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, the region’s governments undertook to “implement gender-sensitive countercyclical policies, in order to mitigate the...

This paper evaluates the redistributive and labour supply effects of transitioning from a joint to a fully individualised income tax system in Ireland. The current Irish tax system, which remains partially joint since the early 2000's, provides a financial advantage to married couples by...

This paper uses the Italian income tax treatment of 2006/7 as a quasi-natural tax experiment to offer some fresh empirical evidence on how labour supply responds to exogenous income tax hikes. We adopt the identification strategy based on TWFE panel data Difference-in-Differences (DID) model to...

A capacity development mission of the Fiscal Affairs Department (FAD) of the IMF visited Luanda, during the period November 6-17, 2023, to provide advice on tax policy and administration reforms to modernize and improve the income tax system. The mission recommended moving from a highly...