Economist @ The Swiss National Bank
The views expressed in these papers are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Swiss National Bank (SNB).
Contact details:
firstname dot lastname at gmail dot com
Swiss National Bank
Börsenstrasse 15
P.O. Box
CH-8022 Zurich
Publications
Corporate Tax Evasion: Evidence from International Trade [WP version][Replication package]
European Economic Review, 2023
Firms appear to under-report exports (sales) and imports (costs) simultaneously to lower reported taxable profits while maintaining consistent income statements. For a representative firm, the resulting elasticity of reported taxable profits is 0.24.
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Responses of FDI to geopolitical risks: The role of governance, information, and technology (with Huanhuan Zheng)
International Business Review, 2023
Perceptions of geopolitical risk and uncertainty (GPR) deter FDI. Geopolitical uncertainty deters FDI more than geopolitical risk. Good governance mitigates the impact of GPR by reducing policy uncertainty. Informed multinational companies (MNCs) avoid GPR, rather than leverage their information advantage to manage it. MNCs transfer technologies across borders to protect their technology FDI against geopolitical shocks.
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Export Fraud in India (with Mehtab Ahmed Jagil) [WP version]
World Trade Review, 2023
Evidence from bunching and bilateral trade statistics shows that exporting firms over-report their exports to frauduently claim a cash rebate proportional to the value of reported exports.
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Programming Strategies or the Making of Success. Evidence from the La Grange and Comédie-Française Registers (1659-1793) (with Louise Moulin)
European Drama and Performance Studies, 2022
Troupes actively tailored their programming strategies to foster plays' success and thus troupes' revenues.
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Tariff Evasion with Endogenous Enforcement [WP version]
Economics Letters, 2021
When the expected punishment for evading increases with the tariff rate, evasion via under-reporting may decrease when the tariff rate rises. Total evasion does not necessarily decrease, as importers use alternative ways to evade duties.
Working papers
Trade intertemporal reporting discrepancies: a puzzle [May 2022]
I document a puzzling pattern in international trade in the European Union (EU): some transactions are reported in December by importers, while they are reported in January of the next year by exporters. I attempt but fail to understand whether this pattern results from innocuous measurement errors, or whether traders manipulate reporting for tax-saving purposes._______________________
Cross-border Value Added Tax Fraud In The European Union [March 2021]
This paper quantifies Value Added Tax (VAT) fraud involving missing traders in the European Union (EU), whereby traders collect VAT and disappear before remitting it to the tax authorities. This scheme is thought to cause large revenue losses to governments, yet estimates of its importance are sparse. It involves cross-border trade and results in firms misreporting their transactions, which in turn affects reported trade statistics in the country in which fraud takes place, yet not in the partner country. To quantify fraud, I exploit the implementation of the Reverse Charge Mechanism to domestic transactions, a reform eliminating missing trader fraud. Based on 54 reform episodes in 24 countries over 2004-2019, I estimate pre-reform fraud levels based on how discrepancies in product-level mirror statistics change at the time of reform, comparing products targeted be the reform (treated) to non-targeted products (control). I find that trade associated with fraudulent activity represents 3.3%-4.2% of trade of treated products, which implies that fraud worth up to EUR 1.7 billion annually is removed thanks to the reform, amounting to 0.21% of VAT revenues._______________________
A Geometry of Innovation (with Friedrich Geiecke) [August 2020]
We use methods from Natural Language Processing to characterize the innovative content of patents. We develop several metrics that compare inventions to existing and future innovations. The intuition guiding us is that patents dissimilar to past inventions and similar to future ones may have anticipated or started shifts in innovation topics. We find non-causal evidence that such patents have higher citations and the firms owning them grow faster and are more profitable relative to other firms. Analysis of trends suggests that innovative ideas may have gotten harder to find over time in high-innovation fields.