Forensics, Elasticities and Benford's Law

Beata Javorcik and Banu Demir ()

No 12798, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: By its very nature, tax evasion is difficult to detect as the parties involved have an incentive to conceal their activities. This paper offers a setting where doing so is possible because of an exogenous shock to the tax rate. It contributes to the literature by proposing two new methods of detecting evasion in the context of border taxes. The first method is based on Benford's law, while the second relies on comparing price and trade cost elasticities of import demand. Both methods produce evidence consistent with an increase in tax evasion after the shock. The paper further shows that evasion induces a bias in the estimation of trade cost elasticity of import demand, leading to miscalculation of gains from trade based on standard welfare formulations. Finally, welfare predictions are derived from a simple Armington trade model that accounts for tax evasion.

Keywords: 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: 2018-03
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 (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP12798 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

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:cpr:ceprdp:12798

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP12798

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().