Wage Effects of Means-Tested Transfers: Incidence Implications of Using Firms as Intermediaries
Conditionally accepted at Journal of the European Economic Association
(with Santiago Garriga); Working Papers: [IFS] (Slides)
[ABSTRACT and FIGURE]

Revealing 21% of GDP in Hidden Assets: Evidence from Argentina
Journal of Public Economics, October 2025, 250: 105471.
(with J. Londoño-Vélez); [Gated version]; Working Papers: [UNU-WIDER] [EU Tax Obs] [World Bank] (Slides)
[ABSTRACT and FIGURE]

Design of Partial Population Experiments with an Application to Spillovers in Tax Compliance
The Review of Economics and Statistics, January 2025, 1-45.
(with G. Cruces, G. Vazquez-Bare); [Gated version] [IFS WP version] (Slides long) (Slides short)
[ABSTRACT and FIGURE]

Firms as Tax Collectors
Journal of Public Economics, May 2024, 233: 105092.
(with P. Garriga) [Gated version] [IFS Working Paper] (Slides) Summary for a broader audience: WB Development Impact Blog
[ABSTRACT and FIGURE]

Summary for a broader audience: FocoEcónomico, WB Data Blog

ABSTRACT

We estimate the effect of a temporary VAT cut and its re-introduction, along with antiprofiteering measures, on food necessities during a period of high inflation in Argentina. Using barcode-level data from over 3,000 supermarkets, we find that: (1) without anti-profiteering measures, prices rose more after the VAT was reinstated than they fell after the cut, with this asymmetry persisting over time; and (2) anti-profiteering measures curbed price increases following the VAT hike. A welfare model shows that the VAT cut had progressive effects and that anti-profiteering measures mitigated the regressive impact of asymmetric pass-through.

Summary for a broader audience: VoxEU-CEPR

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the relationship between tax progressivity and compliance. We leverage a major progressive tax reform in a large Argentine municipality. First, we use a quasi-experimental design to estimate the causal effect of changes in a household’s own tax rates on its tax compliance. Second, we utilize a large-scale natural field experiment to examine whether, holding a household’s own tax rates constant, tax compliance is influenced by the tax rates of poor or rich households. We find that reducing taxes for poor households increases their compliance, while increasing taxes for rich households decreases theirs. When poor households learn about the tax hike on the rich, this increases their stated perceived fairness of the tax system and their actual tax compliance. When rich households learn about the tax cuts for the poor, their stated perceived fairness also increases significantly, but their compliance, if anything, goes down. Leveraging a further reform and an additional field experiment that took place a year later, we show that both the quasi-experimental and experimental findings replicate. Our evidence highlights that tax compliance depends not only on a household’s own tax rate but also on how they truly feel about the broader tax schedule. Our findings also highlight the gap between stated and revealed preferences for redistribution. Lastly, we conduct a counterfactual analysis to illustrate the implications of our findings for the design of tax policies.

Summary for a broader audience: WB Let's Talk Development

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates gender disparities in residential property ownership and tax compliance in a large Argentine municipality using detailed tax administrative data. While ownership is evenly distributed between women, men, and co-owned properties up to the 40th percentile of the value distribution, higher-value properties exhibit significant gender disparities, with women’s share dropping to less than 20% in the top 1%. Tax compliance increases with property value, with an average evasion rate of 46%, and men and women are equally likely to meet their tax obligations across the distribution. However, women face slightly higher effective tax rates due to owning lower-value properties, which are disproportionately affected by a mildly regressive tax schedule. Gender responses to enforcement measures are also comparable. A soft randomized communication campaign significantly increased timely payments equally for both men and women, with men responding more quickly. Similarly, the findings show no gender-based differences in responses to macroeconomic shocks such as COVID-19. The study underscores the role of property tax in promoting equitable revenue mobilization and highlights the importance of gender-disaggregated data for informing tax policy and enforcement strategies.

ABSTRACT

We exploit a large, quasi-randomized, 2.5-year-long income tax holiday to identify intertemporal labor responses of high-wage earners to net wage changes. In August 2013, the Argentine government exempted a group of wage earners from the income tax for 2.5 years while leaving in place the tax on other high-wage earners. Eligibility was based on whether past wage earnings were below a fixed threshold, thus levying sharply different marginal and average tax rates—effectively 0% for workers below the threshold. Using rich population-wide administrative data and a regression discontinuity design, we estimate a precise and very small wage earnings elasticity of 0.017 for this large, salient, and temporary income tax change. Responses are larger for more flexible outcomes (overtime hours) and for more elastic groups (job switchers and managers). We also find avoidance responses from new entrants who faced no tax if their first monthly wage was below the fixed threshold. This strategic entry below the threshold to dodge taxes required coordination with employers. Our findings suggest the presence of rigidities in the labor market, which imply that wage earners' responses to tax changes depend largely on substantial coordination with employers.

ABSTRACT

We disentangle the extent of imperfect competition in product and labor markets using plant-level data. We derive a formula for the ratio between markups and markdowns assuming cost-minimizing firms that face upward-sloping labor supply and downward-sloping product demand curves. We then separate this combined measure of market power by estimating firm-level labor supply elasticities instrumenting wages with a different set of instruments including the use of intermediate inputs, input price shocks, and TFP shocks. Our results suggest that both markets exhibit imperfect competition, but the variation is mainly driven by markups. We also estimate the relative gains of removing market power dispersion on allocative efficiency, finding that markups are more important on TFP than markdowns.

ABSTRACT

We estimate the response of firms and self-employed workers to two revenue taxes—Monotributo and Gross Receipts Tax—across the turnover distribution using rich administrative data from Argentina. We exploit several revenue-dependent discontinuities that provide incentives to underreport taxable income combined with a bunching design to estimate sales elasticities. We also explore heterogeneities by firm size, type of activities, and type of taxpayers. In the case of small firms, we find sizeable bunching below the thresholds that is stronger for higher tax incentives. The response is stronger in sectors that have more space for manipulation, such as service-based activities. In the case of medium and large firms, bunching is more muted but it suggests that even large firms are able to underreport their gross sales to avoid facing higher tax rates. Firms also seem to find more costly the indirect administrative cost of becoming a collection agent than the direct fiscal cost of the Gross Receipts Tax. We cannot rule out, however, that large firms adjust other margins (or taxes) to compensate for the higher tax pressure.

Mobile money represents one of the most transformative advances in communication and financial technology of the current millennium, enabling money transfers through simple mobile text messages. Its diffusion has been particularly impactful in African countries, where access to traditional banking services remains limited. Using billions of mobile money transactions from Tanzania—one of the largest mobile money markets—we document usage patterns across several dimensions, including time of day, day of the week, user loyalty, and gender differences. We further provide novel evidence on behavioral responses to the introduction and subsequent reduction of a levy on mobile money transactions. The asymmetric response we document—characterized by large adjustments along both the extensive and intensive margins following the tax increase, and comparatively muted responses to the subsequent tax decrease—raises concerns about the efficiency costs of this tax. In particular, the common presumption among policymakers that it is possible to overshoot tax rates and later reverse course without lasting effects may not hold, resulting in persistently suboptimal allocations.

We use scanner data from Argentina to study the Precios Cuidados program, a voluntary initiative in which the government negotiated retail price ceilings with manufacturers in exchange for preferential shelf space and visibility in supermarkets. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, we find that the program lowered relative prices and increased sold quantities of participating products compared to similar non-participating goods, without causing stockouts. The timing and magnitude of quantity responses suggest that the program increased demand beyond price effects. To interpret these findings and quantify their welfare implications, we estimate a model of firm pricing and consumer demand, where firms voluntarily accept price ceilings that limit their markups in exchange for advertising benefits. Our analysis shows that price control programs may increase consumer welfare by lowering the relative prices of regulated products and their substitutes while providing incentives for firms to voluntarily participate in them.

We use high-frequency scanner data along with several hundreds naturally occurring variation in price controls at the barcode level in Argentine supermarkets, to uncover new facts about price controls in a setting of high inflation. We use an event study approach where treated goods (barcodes) are compared to otherwise similar goods. First, we show that price controls are indeed effective at holding prices fixed and observe a high rate of compliance. Second, we find little evidence of wide-spread shortages due to the introduction of price controls. Instead, we observe a large increase in quantities purchased, which double on average, as price controls keep prices lower relative to other goods. Third, prices revert to slightly higher levels once a given barcode is no longer subject to price controls, suggesting that such interventions do not have any long lived effects on inflation. As a result, quantities purchased of the controlled barcodes decrease. We also explore substitution behavior between products subject to price controls and close substitutes. The policy seems to have no distributional effects since it benefits rich and poor households equally.

We study to what extent the implementation of evaluation laws affects reported tax expenditures. We exploit the staggered introduction of tax incentives evaluation laws (TIELs) in US states, from 1999 to 2019. Using a novel digitized database of states’ tax expenditures and an event study approach based on the year these laws were enacted, we show that evaluation laws matter for transparency. We find that following the implementation of TIELs, reported tax expenditures increased on average by 14%, equivalent to about 2.44 billion USD at 2023 prices. This effect persists even four years after the laws are introduced. However, we find no changes in states’ tax revenues and direct spending after the TIELs were passed, which indicates that the observed higher reported tax expenditures correspond to previously hidden undisclosed tax expenditures provisions.