The Consequences of Poor Tax Administration: Collections, Growth, and Corruption

This dissertation examines three different aspects of tax administration\u27s effect on tax revenue collection, economic growth, and tax evasion. By understanding the role of good tax administration, policymakers can pursue effective tax reform, increase tax revenues efficiently, and minimize the impact on taxpayers. The first study examines shortfalls in tax revenue, or the tax gap. The tax gap arises for a variety of reasons and understanding the root causes of the gap is a necessary first step in reducing or eliminating the gap. This study examines the contribution of four factors to the tax gap: willful tax evasion, errors in filing taxes, incompetence in the tax administration, and tax collector corruption. By combining firm level data from 79 countries with macroeconomic variables, this study finds that complexity leading to unintentional tax evasion and poor tax administration are significant drivers of the tax gap. Tax reform that reduces tax code complexity and increases the quality of tax administration services provides the largest marginal gains in reducing the tax gap. The second study uses the same data set to examine the effects of tax enforcement measures and tax revenue shortfall on economic growth. Lower tax revenues have a theoretically mixed effect on growth as they create more disposable income for investment, but simultaniously reduce funds for public goods.This study finds that while increased enforcement measures reduce growth, high tax revenue collection serve to increase growth. The results suggest that reforms focusing on increasing revenue without resorting to greater enforcement measures are desirable. The final aspect of tax administration this work examines the the relationship between corrupt tax administration and tax evasion. Since this relationship is endogenous, causality is difficult to determine. Using an instrumental variable approach as well as propensity score matching, this study suggests that corruption drives evasion. As a result, policy makers should focus on ensuring an honest tax administration, thereby addressing both issues simultaneously. Taken together, the results of this dissertation argue for tax reforms to focus on creating a high quality tax administration that focuses on a service paradigm of tax collection. Under the service paradigm, tax authorities provide greater assistance to tax payers, creating conditions favorable for compliance without relying on coercive enforcement measures

Georgia's Brain Gain - Brief

This brief investigates trends in the interstate migration of young college graduates. FRC Brief 19

Identifying Target Markets for Landscape Plant Retail Outlets

Landscape plant retailers must identify target markets to maximize marketing effectiveness. A tobit process is used on a system of three equations with fourteen years of data identifies target markets for different retail outlets. Results, compared with a previous study, show effects of time on target markets.Crop Production/Industries,

Corruption and Firm Tax Evasion

Although corruption and tax evasion are distinct and separate problems, they can easily become intertwined and reinforcing. A society that is more corrupt may enable more tax evasion as corrupt officials seek more income via bribes; conversely, higher levels of tax evasion may drive corruption by offering more opportunities for bribes. While a large body of work on each subject separately has emerged, the relationship between the two problems has remained a largely unexplored area. In particular, there is no theoretical work that examines the relationship between corruption and firm tax evasion, focusing on how the potential for bribery of tax officials affects a firm’s tax evasion decisions, and there is no empirical work that examines these linkages. This paper develops a theoretical model that incorporates the potential for bribery in a firm’s tax reporting decisions, and then tests the main results of the theory using firm level information on reporting obtained from the World Enterprise Survey and the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey. Estimation methods include both instrumental variable methods and propensity score matching methods, and also control for potential endogeneity of evasion and corruption. Results demonstrate that it is corruption that largely drives higher levels of evasion; that is, corruption of tax officials is a statistically and economically significant determinant of tax evasion. Tax inspectors who request bribes result in reduction of sales reported for taxes of between 4 and 10 percentage points. Additionally, larger bribes result in higher levels of evasion, at least up to some point. These results indicate that governments seeking to increase their tax revenues must work first to ensure an honest tax administration

The impact of the abuse-deterrent reformulation of extended-release T OxyContin on prescription pain reliever misuse and heroin initiation

The introduction of abuse-deterrent OxyContin in 2010 was intended to reduce its misuse by making it more tamper resistant. However, some studies have suggested that this reformulation might have had unintended consequences, such as increases in heroin-related deaths. We used the 2005–2014 cross-sectional U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health to explore the impact of this reformulation on intermediate outcomes that precede heroin-related deaths for individuals with a history of OxyContin misuse. Our study sample consisted of adults who misused any prescription pain reliever prior to the reformulation of OxyContin (n = 81,400). Those who misused OxyContin prior to the reformulation were considered the exposed group and those who misused other prescription pain relievers prior to the reformulation were considered the unexposed group. We employed multivariate logistic regression under a difference-in-differences framework to examine the effect of the re- formulation on five dichotomous outcomes: prescription pain reliever misuse; prescription pain reliever use disorder; heroin use; heroin use disorder; and heroin initiation. We found a net reduction in the odds of pre- scription pain reliever misuse (OR:0.791, p \u3c 0.001) and heroin initiation (OR:0.422, p = 0.011) after the reformulation for the exposed group relative to the unexposed group. We found no statistically significant effects of the reformulation on prescription pain reliever use disorder (OR: 0.934, p = 0.524), heroin use (OR: 1.014p = 0.941), and heroin use disorder (OR: 1.063, p = 0.804). Thus, the reformulation of OxyContin appears to have reduced prescription pain reliever misuse without contributing to relatively greater new heroin use among those who misused OxyContin prior to the reformulation

Sport and Society

Despite its economic and cultural centrality, sport is a relatively neglected and undertheorized area of sociological research. In this review, we examine sports\u27 articulation with stratification issues, especially race, class, and gender. In addition, we look at how the media and processes of globalization have affected sports.We suggest that sports and cultural sociologists need to attend more closely to how leisure products and practices are produced and distributed and how they intersect with educational, political, and cultural institutions. We propose the work of Bourdieu andthe new institutionalism to undergird future research

Supplemental Material, appdixx - Growth Effects of VAT Evasion and Enforcement

<p>Supplemental Material, appdixx for Growth Effects of VAT Evasion and Enforcement by Chandler McClellan in Public Finance Review</p