Taxes and benefits

This article studies the differential effect of targeting cash transfers to men or women on household expenditure on non-durables.

The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic and associated containment measures are expected to cause far-reaching damage to economies around the world. Firms are suffering from reduced demand due to movement restrictions, from reduced labour supply and from constraints to sourcing material inputs. The breakup of otherwise healthy businesses in response to a temporary shock implies large social costs. Governments are therefore intent on designing emergency policies to keep businesses afloat. In this brief, the authors present simulations using firm-level tax records from Ethiopia, which vary the duration of the lockdown and the relative impact across sectors.

The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic and associated containment measures are expected to cause far-reaching damage to economies around the world. Firms are suffering from reduced demand due to movement restrictions, from reduced labor supply and from constraints to sourcing material inputs. The breakup of otherwise healthy businesses in response to a temporary shock implies large social costs. Governments are therefore intent on designing emergency policies to keep businesses afloat. In this brief, the authors present simulations using firm-level tax records from Uganda, which vary the duration of the lockdown and the relative impact across sectors.

This paper exploits kinks and notches in the UK personal tax schedule over a 40-year period to investigate how taxpayers respond to income tax and social security contributions. It also develops a new approach for identifying selection in who responds and for decomposing responses into hours and wage components.

Soda taxes aim to reduce excessive sugar consumption. We assess who are most impacted by soda taxes. We estimate demand using micro longitudinal data covering on-the-go purchases, and exploit the panel dimension to estimate individual specific preferences. We relate these preferences and counterfactual predictions to individual characteristics and show that soda taxes are relatively effective at targeting the sugar intake of the young, are less successful at targeting the intake of those with high total dietary sugar, and are unlikely to be strongly regressive especially if consumers benefit from averted internalities.