Abstract: This paper studies firms’ margins of response to a historically large payroll tax cut that affects a subset of Brazilian firms. Difference-in-differences estimates based on plausibly exogenous legal variation indicate that the payroll tax reduction causes an increase in employment, wages, and profits, while capital decreases. Responses are substantially more pronounced among small firms, and workers’ earnings gains are concentrated at the top of the distribution. This evidence cannot be reconciled within a competitive framework. I estimate a model that allows for product and labor market power to explain these findings. Reduced-form estimates reveal that consumers pay 65% of payroll taxes, firm owners 23%, and workers 12%. These results establish not only that payroll tax cuts primarily benefit consumers, but also exacerbate within-firm earnings inequality.

Abstract: What is the cost of informality? On the one hand, an informal sector creates a restriction on the set of policies that can be implemented. On the other hand, its existence offers an alternative for those for whom the benefits of formal relations do not compensate for the costs. Based on Mirrlees’ (1971b) we propose an optimal tax formula that accounts for the existence of informality. This allows us to adopt an inverse-optimum procedure to recover the social objective that rationalizes the current tax system and use it to evaluate the welfare consequences of eliminating the informal sector. Using survey data from Brazil that encompasses formal and informal workers’ wages, we calibrate the model to recover the main parameters that underlie the formalization decision, i.e., the joint distribution of productivity and the formalization costs. We find welfare gains of 6.3% which can be decomposed into a 2% gain from a direct increase in tax revenues and a 4.3% gain from re-optimizing the tax system.

Abstract: We study corporate responses to a minimum income tax, using the universe of corporate tax filings in Honduras. The policy design allows us to separately estimate cost misreporting under profit taxation and the elasticity of reported revenue. Large corporations overreport true costs when taxed on profits. Taxing revenue leads to a substantial decrease in reported revenues: we estimate an elasticity in the range 0.35-1. The elasticity of revenue is attenuated when third-party information on the revenue of firms is available, suggesting misreporting plays an important role. Our results inform trade-offs when broadening tax bases to curb evasion.

Abstract: We derive the optimal joint-income tax schedule for couples, focusing on the distinction between interpersonal and inter-household inequality. Households are composed of two spouses with possibly unequal access to the family’s economic resources. Individual-oriented utilitarianism typically leads to a misalignment between the households’ and the government’s objectives, a phenomenon termed dissonance by Apps and Rees (1988). The traditional ABC formula must be amended by including a Pigouvian term to correct for dissonance. Under general conditions, the effect of dissonance on marginal taxes is ambiguous; its sign depends on whether the less powerful spouse’s marginal contribution to household earnings is less than, or greater than, her marginal entitlement to household consumption. Assuming identical iso-elastic preferences, the multidimensional heterogeneity collapses into a single-dimensional index, preserving the single-crossing property. This simplification enables us to solve Mirrlees (1971)’s multidimensional program and quantitatively assess the size and sign of the Pigouvian term, which is positive across all income levels, leading to higher marginal tax rates.

Abstract: Online marketplace designers frequently run randomized experiments to measure the impact of proposed product changes. However, given that marketplaces are inherently connected, total average treatment effect (TATE) estimates obtained through individual-level randomized experiments may be biased due to violations of the stable unit treatment value assumption, a phenomenon we refer to as “interference bias.” Cluster randomization, i.e., the practice of randomizing treatment assignment at the level of “clusters” of similar individuals, is an established experiment design technique for countering interference bias in social networks, but it is unclear ex ante if it will be effective in marketplace settings. In this paper, we use a meta-experiment or “experiment over experiments” conducted on Airbnb to both provide empirical evidence of interference bias in online market settings and assess the viability of cluster randomization as a tool for reducing interference bias in marketplace TATE estimates. Results from our meta-experiment indicate that at least 19.76% of the TATE estimate produced by an individual-randomized evaluation of the platform fee increase we study is attributable to interference bias and eliminated through the use of cluster randomization. We also find suggestive, non-statistically significant evidence that interference bias in seller-side experiments is more severe in demand-constrained markets, and that the efficacy of cluster randomization at reducing interference bias increases with cluster quality.