Forensics, Elasticities and Benford's Law

Banu Demir (), Beata Smarzynska Javorcik and Beata Smarzynska Javorcik
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Beata Smarzynska Javorcik

No 7266, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Estimates of the trade elasticity based on actual trade policy changes are scarce, and the few that exist are all over the place. This paper offers a setting where an exogenous increase in a border tax can be used to estimate the trade elasticity. It shows theoretically and empirically that if evasion of border taxes is not taken into account, the trade elasticity is estimated with a large downward bias, leading to miscalculation of gains from trade. The paper also contributes to the literature by proposing two new methods of detecting evasion of border taxes.

Keywords: trade elasticity; tax evasion; trade financing; border taxes; Benford's law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int and nep-iue
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp7266.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Forensics, Elasticities and Benford's Law (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_7266

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().