Tax policies, informality, and real wage rigidities

Andres Garcia-Suaza, Fernando Jaramillo () and Marlon Salazar

Borradores de Economia from Banco de la Republica de Colombia

Abstract: Developing countries have a vast informal sector generally associated with low productivity levels. The response of informal employment to tax policies might depend on labor market rigidities. This paper proposes a theoretical framework consisting of a search and matching model with segmentation in the labor market to understand how tax policies and enforcement interact to determine the size of the formal sector. The analytical results show that decreasing payroll taxes increases formal employment demand, and enforcement expenditure decreases informal employment offers. The model suggests that a tax policy combination leads to a significant impact on informality reduction. Moreover, the magnitude of the effect of tax policies depends on real wage rigidities, i.e., when the economy faces high real wage rigidities, the tax policies have a higher effect on informality reduction. **** RESUMEN: Los países en desarrollo presentan un sector informal relevante asociado con bajos niveles de productividad. Los efectos de las políticas tributarias sobre los niveles de informalidad dependen de las rigideces del mercado laboral. En el presente artículo se propone un modelo de busqueda y emparejamiento en un mercado laboral segmentado para entender la interaccion entre las políticas tributarias y la aplicacion de la ley sobre el sector formal. Los resultados analíticos muestran que, disminuir los impuestos a la nomina genera aumentos en la demanda de empleo formal, mientras que un aumento en el gasto de auditar a las empresas disminuye la oferta de empleo informal. El modelo sugiere un impacto significativo en la reduccion de la informalidad al combinar las políticas tributarias. Ademas, la magnitud del efecto de las políticas depende de las rigideces en los salarios reales. De esta forma, cuando la economía presenta altas rigideces en los salarios reales, las políticas tributarias tienen un mayor efecto sobre la reducción de la informalidad.

Keywords: Informality; payroll taxes; fiscal policy; enforcement; search frictions; shirking; Informalidad; Impuestos a la nómina; Política fiscal; Aplicación de la ley; Busqueda y Emparejamiento (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E26 E62 J21 J31 J46 K42 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36
Date: 2023-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-iue, nep-lam, nep-lma and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.32468/be.1245

Related works:
Working Paper: Tax policies, informality, and real wage rigidities (2023)
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:bdr:borrec:1245

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Borradores de Economia from Banco de la Republica de Colombia Cra 7 # 14-78. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Clorith Angélica Bahos Olivera ().