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,...

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...

In 2013, we published an IEB Report on tax reform with the subtitle “We Have Outgrown the Garage and it Needs Clearing Out” – an analogy used by Lawrence Summers in reference to the evolution of tax systems. Nearly 10 years later, the garage has once again filled with clutter....

The shock of COVID-19 and the subsequent response has underscored the importance of the public sector’s role as a backstop. There is no doubt about that. The alternative to public-sector intervention would have been an unprecedented economic collapse. Indeed, unprecedented is more than a rhetorical expression: even with public intervention,...

For nearly a century, international taxation has been based on principles established within the framework of the League of Nations in the 1920s. The existence of sovereign tax systems in an incipient framework of cross-border economic transactions led at that time to the establishment of principles that would guarantee a...

Touching on the territorial debate in Spain, Alejandro Esteller, professor of the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) and director of IEB’s research program in tax systems analysis, offers us a new Info IEB highlighting the advantages of fiscal decentralization based on its ability to adjust to the peculiarities of each Autonomous...