«Not(ch) your average tax rate: corporate taxation under weak enforcement»

«Behavioural responses to the (re) introduction of wealth taxes. Evidence from Spain»

«The elasticity of taxable wealth: evidence from Switzerland»

The current crisis of public finances highlights the importance of a careful design of taxes, and of an appropriate evaluation of tax reforms. The focus cannot be restricted to statutory tax parameters, but should extend to the design and incentives of the tax administration. Understanding behavioral responses of taxpayers and accounting for the effects of globalization are aspects that also deserve consideration. The aim of this workshop is to bring together scholars currently working on these topics either from an analytical or from an empirical perspective. The workshop will run for 1 & ½ day and will include 12 papers.

In this paper I estimate under-assessment of incomes in the Personal Income Tax during the years following its introduction in Spain. The methodology combines an analysis of discrepancy with National Accounts and an econometric exercise, which follows and slightly modifies the Feldman and Slemrod (2007) procedure, based on the relation of reported charitable donations with the composition of income in tax micro-data.
Both calculations show that concealment of income differed substantially across sources and levels, with better compliance at the bottom of the distribution of taxpayers. Because of this, fraud made the tax less progressive than it was on paper. Compliance improved over the next decades, but the overall levels were still far from those attained in developed countries, because of lack of administrative capacity or political will to enforce the new regulation. In this way, general, comprehensive income taxation was hardly a reality 20 years after its introduction.

Tax incidence and tax competition have largely been studied separately. Models assessing the incidence of excise taxes do not consider strategic interaction and exclusively assess the pass-through of taxes to prices. These settings focus on imperfectly competitive markets where prices can react more (less) than proportionally to a variation in tax rates. On the other hand, tax competition models focus on the strategic interactions arising because of a shared tax base but assume producer prices to be constant. Hence, the pass-through of taxes is restricted to be fully on consumers. This paper extends Keen (1997) by relaxing this assumption and, thus, by allowing local governments to internalize the possibility that taxes are over-shifted (undershifted). Interestingly, market structure (that was absent in previous settings), turns out to be one of the determinants of the vertical reaction function in this model; particularly determining the sensitivity of local tax setters to a variation of higher-tier taxes.