10 de marzo – SALA RAMON Y CAJAL – 11h-13.15h

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.

Individual preferences over public policies should ideally be based on the possession of correct information about their reality. To test whether this holds, we conducted four waves of a survey, every six months since May 2020 (still under the COVID-19-lockdown), asking basic macro questions regarding the level of tax burden, of public debt, and of the underground economy in Spain. The percentage of correct responses (defined within broad ranges) never reaches 35%, and it is by far lowest for public debt. For the tax burden, left-wing individuals (with respect to right-wing) make more errors, and highly educated people (with respect to the rest of society) make fewer.

February 14, 2023 – Room 1038 – 14.30h

This paper empirically tests whether property owners react to the salience of taxes in terms of their consumption of public services. Exploiting a policy change that reduced fares on public transport in various municipalities of the metropolitan area of Barcelona, we find that salience of the tax to finance the fare reduction increases the consumption of public transportation. Our empirical findings support the hypothesis that the salience of taxes may affect the consumption behavior of taxpayers and our main results contribute to previous empirical evidence relating tax salience and consumption behavior regarding public services.

L’any 2013, es va editar un IEB Report sobre reforma fiscal que tenia com a subtítol “El garatge ha quedat petit i cal reorganitzar-lo”, a partir d‘una analogia de Lawrence Summers sobre l‘evolució del sistema fiscal. Gairebé deu anys més tard, es torna a plantejar aquesta necessitat. Durant aquest temps, s‘han publicat dos informes de reforma del nostre sistema fiscal: l’anomenat Informe Lagares (2014) i ara el Llibre blanc sobre la reforma tributària (LB) (2022), que gairebé dobla en extensió el primer. Els greus problemes mediambientals i la crisi energètica, la digitalització de l‘economia o la importancia creixent que han adquirit les desigualtats de renda i de riquesa, entre altres motius, justifiquen aquesta major extensió, a part del diagnòstic quantitatiu que el LB (2022) fa de les nostres finances públiques.