We examine two Pakistani programs to explore the role of deterrence as well as social and psychological factors in the tax compliance behavior of agents. In the first of these programs, the government began revealing income tax paid by every taxpayer in the country. The second program publicly...

We examine two Pakistani programs to see if the public disclosure of tax information and social recognition of top taxpayers promote tax compliance. Pakistan began revealing income tax paid by every taxpayer in the country from 2012. Simultaneously, another program began recognizing and...

We develop a positive model of multinational firm behavior and analyze a firm’s incentive to transfer an intellectual property (IP) right of uncertain value offshore ex ante, i.e. before its success or failure is realized. With an asymmetric treatment of losses in the home country, the...

This paper addresses the modern optimal tax progressivity literature, which clarifies the key role of the behavioral response to taxation and accounts for the incomes of the superrich being qualitatively different than others. Some may be "superstars," for whom small differences in talent are...

This paper evaluates proposals for an annual wealth tax. While a dozen OECD countries levied wealth taxes in the recent past, now only three retain them, with only Switzerland raising a comparable fraction of revenue as recent proposals for a US wealth tax. Studies of these taxes sometimes, but...

We examine two Pakistani programs to see if the public disclosure of tax information and social recognition of top taxpayers promote tax compliance. Pakistan began revealing income tax paid by every taxpayer in the country from 2012. Simultaneously, another program began recognizing and...

We examine two Pakistani programs to explore the role of deterrence as well as social and psychological factors in the tax compliance behavior of agents. In the first of these programs, the government began revealing income tax paid by every taxpayer in the country. The second program publicly...

During the period 1996-2000, the coverage of VAT in Pakistan rose by twenty times in terms of the number of firms in the tax net and by ten times in terms of the volume of transactions subject to it. This paper leverages this staggered introduction of VAT in the country to estimate its...

I leverage a Pakistani tax reform that cuts the tax rate on the supply chains of five major industries of the country from 15% to 0% to cast light on the extent of, and mechanisms driving, VAT noncompliance in a representative emerging economy. I find that firms overclaim refunds by 22% and...

Using Ramadan fasting as a natural experiment, we estimate the long-run impacts of in-utero health and nutrition shocks on adult outcomes. We exploit administrative tax return data comprising the universe of income tax returns filed in Pakistan during 2007–2009. The data allow us to link...