Research

• University of Tübingen RSIT Brown Bag seminar

• 2023 ZEW Public Finance conference

• 2023 NICEP conference

• PIMES-UFPE

• ECOBUS Reading Group

• LMU Innovation Workshop

• 2023 Petralia Workshop

• 2023 Annual Congress of the IIPF

• 2023 WHY Symposyum

• 2023 SIEP conference

• University of Colorado Boulder

• 2023 Annual NTA Conference

• Centre for European Economics Research (ZEW)

• 2024 Mannheim Taxation Conference

• Utrecht University

• SJPE Conference on Economic Policy During and After War: Ukraine 2022-present

We study who captures the rents from tax evasion on a marginal transaction through randomized variation in third-party reporting. In an environment of high informality, we experimentally shift transactions between a third-party-reported method of payment (debit card) and a non-reported one (cash). Our survey-experiment, the first of its kind conducted face-to-face, allows us to measure how much of the marginal surplus created by the lack of third-party reporting, if any, is passed on to consumers. We find small, precisely estimated effects, consistent with producers capturing the vast majority of evasion rents. We show that when consumers do not share in evasion rents, policies that incentivize them to act as tax informers are particularly effective at reducing evasion. 

A growing empirical literature documents asymmetric price responses to changes in consumption taxes. Several well-identified studies find that price increases following tax hikes tend to be larger than price reductions following equivalent tax cuts, including Doyle and Samphantharak (2008), Benzarti, Carloni, Harju and Kosonen (2020) and Benzarti, Garriga and Tortarolo (2024). In a standard tax incidence model, however, the direction of a consumption tax change should not matter: incidence is pinned down by demand and supply elasticities, and pass-through is symmetric. The evidence on asymmetric pass-through is therefore a genuine tax-incidence anomaly: it cannot be accommodated by our canonical static incidence models (Hines, 1999; Benzarti, 2024) and sits uneasily with a framework that is routinely used for both research and policy analysis. This gap between widely used theory and accumulating empirical evidence motivates further work on the mechanisms behind asymmetry and on their welfare and distributional implications. This early-stage project aims to unpack these mechanisms using the series of temporary fuel tax changes introduced in several large European countries (Italy, Spain, France and Germany) in 2022, for which finely grained daily station-level price data are available. These countries implemented similar policies—temporary fuel tax discounts—in response to the energy price shock, but differed in the timing, design and salience of the measures. The project will exploit this cross-country variation together with daily station-level data and data from never-treated countries (Denmark) to quantify the degree of asymmetry in price responses to tax cuts and reinstatements. A central objective is to distinguish empirically between the main explanations for asymmetric pass-through put forward in the recent literature. Existing empirical work on asymmetric pass-through is largely reduced-form: studies document that prices respond differently to tax increases and tax cuts in specific reforms, but do relatively little to discriminate between competing mechanisms or to quantify their welfare and distributional implications. Yet different plausible mechanisms behind asymmetric  pass-through have drastically different normative consequences. A central contribution of the project is therefore to move beyond documenting that asymmetry exists and to provide evidence that helps distinguish between mechanisms and connect them to welfare-relevant objects.