Is there a connection between the tax administration and the political power?

This paper offers empirical evidence from Spain of a connection between the tax administration and the political power. Firstly, the regional tax administration is not immune to the budgetary situation of regional government, and tends to exert a greater (or lesser) effort in tax collection the greater (or lower) the (expected) public deficit. At the same time, the system of unconditional grants from the central layer of government provokes an ¿income effect¿ which disincentivises the efforts of the tax administration. Secondly, these efforts also decrease when the margin to lose a parliamentary seat in an electoral district is cut, although the importance of this disincentive decreases according to the parliamentary strength of the incumbent- Aquest article oferix proves empíriques d'Espanya d'una connexió entre l'administració fiscal i el poder polític. En primer lloc, l'administració regional fiscal no és immune a la situació pressupostària de govern regional, i tendeix a exercir un major (o menor) l'esforç en la col·lecció fiscal el major (o més baix) el dèficit (esperat) públic. Al mateix temps, el sistema de subvencions incondicionals de la capa central de govern provoca " un efecte d'ingrés " que el desànim es disminuïx segons la força parlamentària de l'encarregat

A Basic Model of Optimal Tax Enforcement under Liquidity Constraints

I design a basic model based on the role of the tax administration as a lender of last resort (Andreoni 1992). If the administration's sole concern is for tax revenues, then it is optimal for it to make taxpayers take an unfair gamble. However, if it also gives some weight to the taxpayers' welfare in its objective function and this is sufficiently large, the situation might be reversed so that the auditing probability is lower and the evasion rate is higher. Under decreasing absolute risk aversion preferences, optimal enforcement is counter-cyclical (that is, greater liquidity constraints imply a higher level of enforcement) unless the administration attaches a considerable amount of weight to taxpayers' utility, which - at least in "normal times" - seems implausible. These theoretical results are complemented with numerical simulations

US Excise Tax Horizontal Interdependence: Yardstick vs. Tax Competition

US excise tax rates are state interdependent. For example, a one-cent increase in the cigarette tax rate implies a contemporaneous cigarette tax increase of 0.18 cents in the neighboring state, while in the case of gasoline taxation the reaction to the same rise is just 0.11 cents. However, identifying the source of this interaction is key to its normative assessment. Our empirical analysis – spanning the period 1992 to 2006 – finds that interdependence in the case of gasoline taxation is driven just by the (fear of) base mobility. By contrast, in the case of cigarette taxation, it is politically driven: only states with non-term limited governors react (providing evidence of yardstick competition), especially as the election year approaches. Additionally, cigarette taxes tend to be lower when the election year approaches, but again only under non-term limited governors, while the existence of smokers in the state tends to reduce the level of cigarette taxation independently of the electoral cycle and of the presence of a term limited governor.vertical tax competition; yardstick competition; termlimit; election year

An empirical analysis of wealth taxation: Equity Vs.tax compliance

Capital taxation is currently under debate, basically due to problems of administrative control and proper assessment of the levied assets. We analyze both problems focusing on a capital tax, the annual wealth tax (WT), which is only applied in five OECD countries, being Spain one of them. We concentrate our analysis on top 1% adult population, which permits us to describe the evolution of wealth concentration in Spain along 1983-2001. On average top 1% holds about 18% of total wealth, which rises to 19% when tax incompliance and under-assessment is corrected for housing, the main asset. The evolution suggests wealth concentration has risen. Regarding WT, we analyze whether it helps to reduce wealth inequality or, on the contrary, it reinforces vertical inequity (due to especial concessions) and horizontal inequity (due to the de iure and to de facto different treatment of assets). We analyze in detail housing and equity shares. By means of a time series analysis, we relate the reported values with reasonable price indicators and proxies of the propensity to save. We infer net tax compliance is extremely low, which includes both what we commonly understand by (gross) tax compliance and the degree of under-assessment due to fiscal legislation (for housing). That is especially true for housing, whose level of net tax compliance is well below 50%. Hence, we corroborate the difficulties in taxing capital, and so cast doubts on the current role of the WT in Spain in reducing wealth inequality.Wealth tax, wealth distribution, tax compliance.

Optimal tax administration responses to fake mobility and underreporting

In a two-country model, the citizens of a ‘big home country’ can either fictitiously move residence to a ‘small foreign country’ where residence-based taxes are lower (external tax avoidance), or under-report the tax base at home (internal tax avoidance). Tax setting is the result of Cournot-Nash competition between revenue maximizing governments, with the home government also setting two types of administration policies, one for each form of tax avoidance. We show that although it is optimal to employ both types of administration policies, which in themselves are both effective at tackling the targeted form of tax avoidance, the optimum is characterized by a tradeoff in terms of policy outcomes: either internal avoidance increases and external avoidance decreases, or the opposite, depending on the characteristics of the fiscal environment

(Uncontrolled) Aggregate shocks or vertical tax interdependence? Evidence from gasoline and cigarettes [WP-IEB]

Besley and Rosen (1998) were the first authors to empirically estimate the presence of vertical tax externalities. They tested it on gasoline and tobacco unitary taxes. However, they did not take into account the difference in cost of living across states: high cost areas pay less in real terms than low cost areas, since the nominal unit tax on cigarettes and gasoline does not differ according to the state in which it is applied. Consequently, we propose that vertical tax competition can be estimated by deflating all financial variables using the House Price Index (HPI), which is disaggregated by states. This produces a federal tax variable that is expressed in real terms and shows cross-sectional variation. This empirical strategy enabled us to disentangle the vertical interdependence between state and federal tax rates from aggregate shocks over time, using US data from 1975 to 2006 on gasoline and tobacco. We found significant horizontal tax competition, which was higher for cigarettes, but no vertical tax reaction. The results were robust to the period analyzed

Politics or mobility? Evidence from US excise taxation

We test for the state interdependence of gasoline and cigarette taxation in the US (1975-2006). We estimate a tax reaction function, and find that state interdependence is due solely to yardstick competition, since any interaction disappears completely in the case of states with lame duck governors. This result holds for both taxes: the short-run reaction of those states whose governor is eligible to stand for reelection is 0.13 and 0.21 for gasoline and cigarette taxation, respectively. In the long run, the cigarette tax rates levied in a jurisdiction match those of its neighbors perfectly, while the long-run reaction in the case of gasoline is much lower at 0.72

Tax Evasion in Interrelated Taxes

In 1969, Shoup postulated that the presence of interrelated taxes in a tax system would reinforce the tax penalty system ("self-reinforcing penalty system of taxes"). In this paper, we have tried to formally develop this idea. We find that in order for tax reinforcement to be maintained, it is necessary for interrelated taxes to be administered by a single tax administration, or if they are administered by different tax administrations, the level of collaboration between them has to be sufficiently high. If so, tax evasion in interrelated taxes might be considered as an alternative explanation for the gap between the levels of tax evasion that can be guessed in practice and the much higher levels predicted by the classical tax evasion theory (Allingham and Sandmo, 1972; Yitzhaki, 1974). Otherwise, the result anticipated by Shoup may even be reversed. Moreover, as long as collaboration is imperfect, the classical results of the comparative statics might change, since in some cases, although global tax compliance increases when faced with a variation in a tax parameter, it can decrease in a single tax

España estrena en enero su impuesto sobre transacciones financieras (y no se llama Tasa Tobin)

Para empezar, aclaremos que la figura tributaria que vamos a tratar no es una tasa (tributo por cuyo pago el contribuyente recibe una contraprestación directa del sector público), sino un impuesto

Imposición óptima y descentralización fiscal: El caso del IRPF

Dada la capacidad normativa de que disponen las CCAA de régimen común y foral en el IRPF, ¿puede aumentar la descentralización fiscal el bienestar social? Para valorarlo, nos centramos en un elemento legal paradigmático: el tipo marginal máximo que aplica sobre la renta laboral. Utilizando el instrumental que nos ofrece la teoría de la imposición óptima (Saez, 2001), comparamos - a partir de micro-datos de la Encuesta de condiciones de vida (INE) - los tipos reales con los óptimos. Obtenemos que existen, para todas las CCAA, discrepancias; estando siempre los marginales óptimos por encima de los reales. La discrepancia promedio es de 10 puntos porcentuales (p.p.), resultado máxima (mínima) para la CA de Madrid (Navarra), 23 (2) p.p. Eso sí, partiendo del tipo que resulta de la ausencia de actividad legislativa por parte de los gobiernos subcentrales, excepto cuatro CCAA, todas han aproximado los marginales hacia su óptimo