OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
To reserve a time to meet with the speaker, please register at the following form:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kLjBd5V63u3W1DGy6lgtS8S9YcbM_dTHDk767ItZwfM/edit#gid=0
Abstract:
In standard tax-compliance models, tax withholding at source is irrelevant. In these models, tax compliance is determined by a combination of enforcement (via audits and penalties), social motives, and third-party reporting, which deters evasion by enabling the tax authority to verify self-reported liability. The fact that third parties may also withhold taxes at source – and the impact of withholding on compliance – has largely been ignored. Yet tax withholding is common around the world: withholding of the personal income tax by employers is almost universal, and withholding is also applied to firms, especially in low-income countries. We provide a simple framework to rationalize the use of tax withholding as a compliance mechanism and test its predictions using administrative data from Costa Rica. We find that doubling the tax withholding rate applied by credit-card companies increases sales tax remittance among treated firms by 39% and aggregate sales tax revenue by 8%, even though the statutory tax rate and third-party reporting requirements remain unchanged. The mechanisms are a default payment effect and a change in enforcement perceptions. Our findings contribute to a broader debate about the determinants of fiscal capacity among countries at different levels of economic development.
Download the paper:
sites.google.com/site/annebrockmeyerworldbank/home
