Collaborative Tax Evasion in the Provision of Services to Consumers: A Field Experiment

We conduct a field experiment with sellers of home improvement services on two German online markets. We take the role of consumers and vary whether we request an invoice for the delivery of the service. In a market that allows anyone to sell anonymously, a willingness to evade is prevalent. In a market that keeps track of credentials, sellers are only willing to evade when a willingness to collude is signaled. The evasion discount is in most estimates not larger than the tax subsidy for legal demand. Evasion is unlikely to be beneficial for many consumers in our setting. (JEL C93, H25, H26, L84)

Winners and Losers: The Distributional Effects of the French Feebate on the Automobile Market

I quantify the welfare and environmental gains and losses from a policy establishing an environmental tax/subsidy for new cars in France in 2008. I estimate a structural model of demand and supply that features heterogeneity in consumer preferences to go beyond the average policy effects and analyse distributional aspects. The policy reduces average carbon emissions by 1.6% at the cost of additional emissions of local pollutants. The regulation favours middle-income individuals but has redistributive effects when combined with a tax that is proportional to income. Moreover, local pollutant emissions increase least in poor and rural areas, suggesting another redistribution channel.

Mechanism Design for Demand Management in Energy Communities

We consider a demand management problem in an energy community, in which several users obtain energy from an external organization such as an energy company and pay for the energy according to pre-specified prices that consist of a time-dependent price per unit of energy as well as a separate price for peak demand. Since users’ utilities are their private information, which they may not be willing to share, a mediator, known as the planner, is introduced to help optimize the overall satisfaction of the community (total utility minus total payments) by mechanism design. A mechanism consists of a message space, a tax/subsidy, and an allocation function for each user. Each user reports a message chosen from her own message space, then receives some amount of energy determined by the allocation function, and pays the tax specified by the tax function. A desirable mechanism induces a game, the Nash equilibria (NE), of which results in an allocation that coincides with the optimal allocation for the community. As a starting point, we design a mechanism for the energy community with desirable properties such as full implementation, strong budget balance and individual rationality for both users and the planner. We then modify this baseline mechanism for communities where message exchanges are allowed only within neighborhoods, and consequently, the tax/subsidy and allocation functions of each user are only determined by the messages from their neighbors. All of the desirable properties of the baseline mechanism are preserved in the distributed mechanism. Finally, we present a learning algorithm for the baseline mechanism, based on projected gradient descent, that is guaranteed to converge to the NE of the induced game.

Strategic trade policy with interlocking cross-ownership

By analysing interlocking cross-ownership, this work reconsiders the inefficiency of activist governments that set subsidies for their exporters (Brander and Spencer, J Int Econ 18:83–100). Making use of a third-market Cournot duopoly model, we show that the implementation of strategic trade policy in the form of a tax (subsidy) when goods are differentiated (complements) is Pareto-superior to free trade within precise ranges of firms’ cross-ownership, richly depending on the degree of product competition. These results challenge the conventional ones in which public intervention (1) is always the provision of a subsidy and (2) always leads to a Pareto-inferior (resp. Pareto-superior) equilibrium when products are substitutes (resp. complements).

Do People Respond to the Mortgage Interest Deduction? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Denmark

Using a major reform that scaled back the mortgage interest deduction for middle- and high-income households in Denmark, we study how tax subsidies affect housing decisions. We present four main findings. First, the mortgage deduction has a precisely estimated zero effect on homeownership for high- and middle-income households. Second, the mortgage deduction has a clear effect on housing demand at the intensive margin, inducing homeowners to buy larger and more expensive houses. Third, the deduction has sizeable effects on household financial decisions, inducing them to increase indebtedness. Finally, the reduction of the tax subsidy lowered equilibrium house prices. (JEL G21, G51, H24, K34, R21, R31)

Life Expectancy Heterogeneity and Pension Fairness: An Italian North-South Divide

This work documents a persistent life expectancy heterogeneity by gender and geography in Italy during the period 1995–2019. Based on deviations of life expectancy at age 65, it quantifies the implicit tax/subsidy mechanism triggered when pensions annuities are computed by adopting the same value of longevity for the whole population. The intensity of this transfer mechanism is then measured and projected over the decade 2020–2030. Results show that females are subsidized while males are taxed by around 10%. Differences by geography persist along the Italian territory. Since 1995 the macroarea of Mezzogiorno has been taxed by 2%, Center and North-West macroareas are being subsidized by around 1%, whereas North-East by 2%. The intensity of the mechanism, despite decreases over time, is higher among females since the year 2000. From a geographical perspective, the macroarea of Mezzogiorno shows the lowest intensity, but also the lowest reduction as compared to other macroareas. Projections indicate that the North-South divide in this implicit transfer mechanism will persist over the next decade.