Tax Incidence Research Articles

The Tax Incidence and Tax Pass-Through of Smokeless Tobacco in the US

Background: States adopt different tax bases for smokeless tobacco (SLT), making tax incidence on SLT not directly comparable across states. In addition, how taxes are passed through to SLT prices among states that impose specific taxes, and whether the pass-through rates for SLT are affected by the uptake and evolution of e-cigarettes, is unknown. Objective: This study will calculate the tax incidence on SLT and investigate how SLT taxes are passed to prices at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile levels, as well as whether these pass-through rates vary by e-cigarette uptake and evolution. Methods: We regressed SLT prices on specific taxes using ordinary least square regressions while controlling for state-, year-, and quarter-fixed effects. We then tested the difference in tax pass-through rates by different periods. Findings: The average tax incidence on chewing tobacco, moist snuff, dry snuff, and snus was 22%, 22%, 23%, and 20%, respectively. For moist snuff, taxes were fully passed to prices at the 25th and 50th percentiles (rate = 1.01, p < 0.001) and overly passed to prices at the 75th percentile (rate = 1.25, p < 0.001). The e-cigarette uptake and evolution significantly raised taxes by 13 cents and 14 cents per ounce, respectively, for moist snuff at the 75th percentile prices (p < 0.05). Conclusions: If harm is considered a criterion for taxing tobacco products, the tax incidence on SLT could be further increased. Considering that lower-priced SLT have lower tax pass-through rates, price promotion restrictions and minimum pricing laws may be needed to increase the cost of lower-priced products. Additionally, we observed that tobacco companies tended to increase tax pass-through for premium SLT products as e-cigarettes gained popularity, which may indicate a strategic response to shifting consumer preferences.

Five Years of Digital Services Taxes in Europe: What Have We Learned?

This article aims to assess whether digital services taxes (DSTs) have been effective in achieving their policy goals as well as identify key unresolved questions and highlight how the evidence from five years of DSTs’ existence in Europe can help in resolving them. The article analyses DSTs’ key policy goals with a particular focus on the equalization of the tax gap and creating fair taxation in the context of a tax incidence. It is based on publicly available data related to introducing five selected DSTs based on the similarity of both their design and the economic situation of the countries in which they were introduced. The collected revenue, fiscal efficiency of these taxes, and taxpayers’ reactions strongly indicate that DSTs have been passed on to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and consumers to a great extent while yielding negligible revenues that contradicts their policy goals. Due to limitations in data availability and the occurrence of two significant disruptions in the economy during the analysed period, some questions remain unanswered. Therefore, in the context of theoretical economic literature applicable to the case of DSTs, this author indicates where additional in-depth research and governmental analysis of DSTs is necessary and what the possible approaches are to obtain sufficient grounds for political decisions regarding introducing similar measures.

REFORMULANDO O JOGO TRIBUTÁRIO: DESAFIOS E SOLUÇÕES NAS TRANSAÇÕES DE GAMES ON-LINE

In recent years, computer games have gained widespread popularity, driven by technological advancements and internet expansion, leading to the prevalence of on-line gaming and the decline of physical media. The taxation of these games has become a debated issue, particularly regarding the differentiation between off-the-shelf and custom software. In 2021, the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court deemed software taxable as services. Uncertainties have arisen regarding in-game transactions, encompassing the acquisition of goods, rights, or financial operations. This article aims to understand whether transactions in on-line games qualify as the acquisition of goods or services, determining the applicable taxes, considering the Brazilian legal landscape post-Tax Reform. Specific objectives include grasping technical distinctions between goods, commodities, and services; conceptualizing and distinguishing software and on-line games from a technological perspective; outlining types of transactions in on-line games to support their legal classification; understanding the Supreme Court's rationale on software as services; and analyzing the impact of the Tax Reform on the taxation of in-game transactions. The research, characterized as pure and explanatory, employs a qualitative approach, deductive method, and bibliographic/documentary procedures. It concludes that the accurate taxation of on-line gaming transactions is a significant source of legal uncertainty, stemming from the classification and legality of tax incidence. The Tax Reform, by instituting a single tax for operations involving goods, services, and rights, holds the potential to resolve these uncertainties, rendering unnecessary the determination of the nature of operations for tax purposes.

Cost misperception and voting for public goods

AbstractPublic good provision is often determined through referendums by voters, who weigh benefits against costs. However, perceptions of benefits and costs may be incorrect, which could in turn lead to voter error and misallocation of public goods. Using real‐world referendums, we evaluate voter perceptions of the private costs of providing public goods by conducting three exit polls of New England voters and an online survey of California voters. By comparing cost perceptions to actual tax incidence, we find pervasive evidence that voters misperceive costs. Fewer than 20% of voters in our samples reported perceived costs within 25% of estimated actual costs. These findings are unsurprising given the ubiquity of opaque language explaining the financial consequences of public good referendums. In addition, our analysis suggests that actual costs have no statistical bearing on voter choice, but at least in the New England sample, voter approval is affected by perceived costs. Thus, a substantial proportion of voters are making decisions based in part on inaccurate costs, which in some cases lead to people voting against their preferences and potential misallocation of public funds. Further, researchers who match voter approval with estimated actual cost are unlikely to obtain accurate cost responsiveness or valuation estimates.

Payroll tax incidence: Evidence from unemployment insurance

Economic models assume that payroll tax burdens fall fully on workers, but where does tax incidence fall when taxes are firm-specific and time-varying? Unemployment insurance in the United States has the key feature of varying both across employers and over time, creating the potential for labor demand responses if tax costs cannot be fully passed through to worker wages. Using state policy changes and administrative data of matched employer–employee job spells, I study how employment and earnings respond to unexpected payroll tax increases for highly exposed employers. I find significant drops in employment growth driven by lower hiring, and minimal evidence of pass-through to earnings. The negative employment effects are strongest for young workers and single-establishment firms.

Estimation of tax incidence in Beijing housing market

ABSTRACT Capital gains tax (CGT) in China charges 20% of the profit from home resale, exempted only if the seller owns only one home and the seller has owned it for more than five years. This work estimates how CGT is shared between seller and buyer. By calculating the price differential between similar CGT-accrued housing units and CGT-exempt housing units and estimating CGT accrued, we find that approximately 50% of CGT is in fact transferred to the buyer. It should be noted that 50% is a lower bound of actual buyer incidence due to data limitations. Appreciating, liquid, quality housing units are associated with higher tax incidence for buyers. To address non-hedonic motives to sell, it is also shown that the price differential between CGT- accrued and CGT-exempt housing units is not a result of demand for liquidity or out of market conditions. This work suggests that regulators should be prudent in utilizing such tax as tools to deter speculation in the housing market.

Emission Taxes and Capital Investments: The Role of Tax Incidence

ABSTRACT This paper examines investment responses to emission taxes and the role of tax incidence in passing on tax burdens. Using private firms from Spain and the introduction of an emission tax in 2013 in the Autonomous Community Valenciana, we show that investments decline in response to the emission tax. Importantly, this investment decline does not depend on the level of pollution but on economic factors related to tax incidence. Investments in firms operating in highly competitive markets, firms with low pricing power, and firms with low financial flexibility are the most affected by environmental taxes. We generalize the investment findings using the introduction of carbon taxes in France and Ireland in a stacked difference-in-differences design. Overall, our results indicate that emission taxes affect not only polluters but also other firms and stakeholders such as suppliers, customers, and consumers depending on the relative elasticities of supply and demand. Data Availability: Data are available from the sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: H22; H23; H32; G31.

Pass-through and tax incidence in Cournot duopoly with loan commitment

Pass-through and tax incidence in Cournot duopoly with loan commitment

Footprint analysis and the incidence of emission taxes

We show that the incidence of emission taxes on consumer income classes is proportional to the footprints of their respective consumption bundles. The dimensions of the footprints are industry by product, but the literature employs industry-by-industry input-output coefficients. We rectify footprint analysis by returning to the underlying national accounts, the use and make tables. Bringing in budget shares data of the different income classes (Engel curves), we show that the carbon dioxide footprint per euro expenditure decreases with income in the Netherlands. Our result renders an emission tax regressive and thus implies a tradeoff between environmental and income policies.

Tax incentives and firm social insurance contributions: Evidence from China

Tax incentives are closely related to employees' income. The relationship between tax incentives and firm social insurance contributions is underexplored in existing literature. We construct a theoretical model to portray the impact of tax incentives on firm social security contributions and use China's accelerated depreciation policy for fixed assets (AD reform) to test it empirically. We find that the tax incentives effectively increase the social security contributions of firms. This effect is more pronounced in large firms, firms with high capital intensity, firms with strong bargaining power of employees, and firms with social security contributions levied by the social security department. Moreover, the AD reform promotes improvements in firm productivity and performance by increasing investment in machinery and equipment, increasing the rents shared by firms with employees, and thus indirectly boosting firms' social security contributions. Overall, Our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of rent-sharing between firms and employees, as well as enhancing our understanding of the effective incidence of taxes in less developed regions.

Environmental Injustice: The Effects of Environmental Taxes on Income Distribution in an Oligopolistic General Equilibrium Model

We apply a static oligopolistic general equilibrium model to investigate the effects of an environmental tax on labor incomes, capital incomes, profits, and the distribution of income. The study is motivated by the fact that environmental taxation is one main political tool to realize environmental sustainability and support sustainable development. However, to ensure social and economic sustainability, the taxes applied must be perceived as fair by the majority of the civil society. Moreover, efforts to determine a fair taxation policy would ensure, inter alia, responsible consumption and production, and lower inequality in the economy, which are one of the two priorities of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 10 and 12). Therefore, it is necessary to determine the tax incidence to inform policymakers regarding the distribution of the tax burden. To examine environmental policy, we assume the government applies a policy objective to realize strong environmental sustainability, as proposed by the Dutch economist Rofie Hueting. The main result is that oligopolistic firms can shift the whole tax burden resulting from environmental taxes to workers and capital owners. Consequently, we show that environmental taxes can lead to more income inequality, and the more concentrated the markets, the bigger the social and economic inequality. Noting that addressing environmental problems is a priority of the UN SDGs, our analysis shows that approaching the issue using just environmental tax propositions is not advisable. These results of the analysis also provide a justification of why many members of the society tend to oppose environmental taxes.

Investigating the international corporate tax revenue efficiency under the digital economy: multiple case study of MNES operating in India

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to validate the theoretical finding that digital MNEs avoid physical presence norms of permanent establishment and royalty characterization rules for business and royalty taxation, respectively, to escape tax incidence in the market economy, using information, communication and technology features and transfer pricing (TP) manipulations.Design/methodology/approachMultiple case studies of MNEs from technology sector, based on judicial decisions in 141 cases, over taxability of profits earned from Indian economic activities. Additional in-depth case study of the Uber Group to study the tax avoidance structures under platform economy, by routing of Indian profits through The Netherlands, a tax haven.FindingsThe study finds a significant number of digital MNEs earning profits from India and avoiding tax by defying physical presence and royalty characterization. In majority of the cases, demand-side business activities are discharged through incorporating and remunerating affiliates at cost plus low markup, thus avoiding tax incidence, using TP manipulations under the arm’s length principle applied by governments for benchmarking the intragroup transactions of the MNEs.Research limitations/implicationsThe research findings validate the view that digital features promote tax avoidance in the market economy.Originality/valueThe originality of the study lies in the validation of profit shifting through digital features from the developing market economy and portending that digital MNEs defy physical presence to avoid business taxation through TP manipulations.

Efficiency and Incidence of Taxation with Free Entry and Love-of-Variety Preferences

We develop a theory of commodity taxation featuring imperfect competition along with love-of-variety preferences and endogenous firm entry and exit. We derive new formulas for the efficiency and pass-through of specific and ad valorem taxes. These formulas unify existing canonical ones and feature a new term capturing the effect of variety on consumer surplus. As a proof of concept, we use theoretical formulas to identify love-of-variety preferences in an empirical application. Our welfare analysis shows that the marginal excess burden is sensitive to the estimated love of variety, which overturns classical results on the desirability of ad valorem versus specific taxation. (JEL D11, D21, D91, H25)

A Simple Model of Corporate Tax Incidence

We analyze the incidence of a linear corporate tax using a simple and portable competitive general equilibrium model in which capital owners choose to invest either in domestic production or a foreign investment opportunity and workers make extensive margin labor supply decisions. Our analysis explores the effect of corporate taxation on wages, employment, domestic profits, and domestic investment. Analytical results and numerical simulations generate insights in line with recent empirical evidence on corporate tax incidence: the burden of the corporate tax is shared between workers and firms, with larger responses among more capital-intensive firms.

Who Benefits from State Corporate Tax Cuts? A Local Labor Market Approach with Heterogeneous Firms: Further Results

This paper estimates state corporate tax incidence using new data and methods for estimating the effects on profits. Extending Suarez Serrato and Zidar (2016), we develop two identification approaches that use the effects on incumbent firm labor demand and local productivity. We estimate these effects using data from census, show how they identify parameters, and provide incidence estimates using reduced-form and structural approaches. Across these approaches, we find that owners bear a substantial portion of incidence. Our central estimate is that firm owners bear half of the incidence, while workers and landowners bear 25-40 percent and 10-15 percent, respectively.

Heterogeneity in Corporate Tax Incidence by Worker Characteristics

We study how corporate tax incidence on worker earnings varies across worker characteristics: gender, age, and employment tenure. To do so, we examine effects of the corporate tax cuts introduced by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), using data from federal tax records and a difference-in-differences empirical design. We find no systematic differential effects by gender but find that TCJA resulted in larger earnings gaps for older workers and long-tenured workers. These gaps become larger towards the top of the within-firm earnings distribution.

The Relationship between Tax Incidence and Tax Avoidance in Indonesia’s Industrial Sector

Taxes are believed to distort how firms behave and market equilibrium. Since tax reduces equity returns, firms will intuitively reduce tax costs through tax avoidance and any other production or operational cost to achieve the highest returns. One of the production costs that often under hair cross is labour cost. Firms can use their bargaining power to reduce wages to offset tax costs. On the other hand, firms' attempt to reduce wages might, in turn, lower their production output. Lower output means a lesser taxable base and less marginal benefit for tax avoidance. Lower output also means lower equity returns and might incentivize firms to do more tax avoidance. Therefore, many researchers are looking for answers to the following question: how much do firms avoid tax in the face of their capability to shift the tax burden to labour? This study aims to investigate the relationship between tax incidence and tax avoidance in the industrial sector in Indonesia. While previous studies have shown solid empirical support for this relationship, Indonesia's employment conditions and industrial characteristics differ from those in the United States and other countries. The data for the study was taken from the reports of IDX-listed companies in the industrial sector ranging from the year 2018 to the year 2022. The data analysis uses Generalized Least Square (GLS) panel data regression. Using education level as a proxy for tax incidence and cash ETR as a proxy for tax avoidance, the authors found no significant connection between them because the industrial sector predominantly employs a much higher number of workers with low education levels compared to those with higher education. Additionally, highly educated workers in Indonesia often face job market challenges; thus, horizontal mismatches happen. Instead, other variables like sales growth, leverage, firm size, SG&A expenses, and loss carryforward significantly influence tax avoidance.

AWARENESS AND SATISFACTION LEVEL OF GST AMONG RETAILERS

The Goods and Service Tax (GST), the biggest reform in India’s indirect tax structure since the economy began to be opened up 25 years ago at last looks set to become a reality. The Constitution Amendment Bill finally got the nod of Rajya Sabha. The government successfully stitched together a political consensus on the GST Bill to pave the way for the much-awaited rollout of the landmark tax reform that will create a common market of 1.25 billion people. GST will be a game-changing reform for the Indian economy by developing a common Indian market and reducing the cascading effect of tax on the cost of goods and services. It will impact the Tax structure, Tax incidence, and Tax computation. Tax payment, Compliance, Credit utilization, and reporting led to a complete overhaul of the current indirect tax system. Law provides for a period that may extend to five years, based on the recommendations of the GST Council. Here, every taxpayer will be issued a 15-digit common Identification Number which will be called a “Goods and Service Identification Number” (GSTIN) a pan-based number. GST is a consumption-based tax levied on the sale, manufacturing, and consumption of goods and services at the national level. Many taxes have been subsumed under the GST Act.

Tax Incidence in Heterogeneous Markets: The Pass-Through of Air Passenger Taxes on Airfares

Tax Incidence in Heterogeneous Markets: The Pass-Through of Air Passenger Taxes on Airfares

Tax Incidence Anomalies

Tax Incidence Anomalies