If online transactions are tax-free, increased online shopping may lower tax rates as jurisdictions seek to reduce tax avoidance; but, if online firms remit taxes, online sales may put upward pressure on tax rates because internet sales help enforce destination-based taxes. I find that higher...

Technological innovations facilitating e-commerce have well-documented effects on consumer behavior and firm organization in the retail sector, but the effects of these new transaction technologies on fiscal systems remain unknown. By extending models of commodity tax competition to include...

Posting tax-inclusive price tags on grocery products can reduce demand through an information effect that corrects consumers who misperceive the actual tax status. We disentangle the information effect from the salience effect developed by Chetty, Looney, and Kroft (2009, CLK for short). By...

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in the landmark 2018 Wayfair case greatly improved state governments' ability to enforce collection of sales taxes on a destination basis. This has reduced state tax competition with an essentially-untaxed internet, but has brought traditional cross-border...

This paper uses Nebraska sales tax data to estimate the magnitude of cross-border shopping in response to travel cost when a local sales tax changes. The results indicate that a one percent increase in a local sales tax induces cross-border shopping by 4.81 percent in a city that has an adjacent...

This paper analyses a game theoretic model of tax competition in a system where tax authorities are revenue optimisers and countries are differentiated by size. The model accommodates more than two countries. In equilibrium, larger countries set higher tax rates non-cooperatively. By applying...

Requiring firms, rather than individuals, to remit sales taxes improves tax compliance. In the U.S., this shift toward firm-based remittance rules for remote purchases occurred gradually after South Dakota v. Wayfair. Using comprehensive and high-frequency local sales tax revenue data, we show...

What is the effect of e-commerce on the geographic distribution of local sales tax revenues? Using COVID-19 as a shock to online shopping and hand-collected high-frequency data on local sales tax revenue, we document an important shift in the state and local public finance landscape. As...

Exploiting reforms requiring online vendors to remit taxes on a destination basis and using the unprecedented shock to online shopping due to COVID-19, we examine the effect of e-commerce on the distribution of tax revenues across urban and rural jurisdictions. We assemble a high-frequency and...