逃税的市场外部性

摘要

This paper presents evidence of market externalities of tax evasion: firms’ tax non-compliance distorts the outcomes of their competitors. Using novel administrative data on Italian firms, we estimate tax evasion through firms’ manipulation of revenue to access preferential tax regimes. Our empirical approach uses policyinduced changes in tax notches’ size to predict the fraction of non-compliant firms in each market. We find that non-compliant firms lead to significant revenue and productivity losses for their competitors, who then pass on some of this burden to their workers. This unfair competition harms aggregate productivity, partly due to a worsening of allocative efficiency.