Corporate Taxation under Weak Enforcement
基于哥斯达黎加企业数据，发现边际税率提高时企业大幅增加成本、小幅减少收入，导致应税利润弹性高达3-5，并指出最优税率低于25%，扩大税基、降低税率可近乎翻倍税收。
How should developing countries tax corporate income? We study this question in Costa Rica, where firms face higher average tax rates on profits when revenues marginally increase. We combine discontinuity and bunching designs to estimate the elasticity of taxable profit and separate it into revenue and cost elasticities. We find that firms faced with a higher tax rate slightly reduce revenues but considerably increase costs, thus producing a large elasticity of taxable profit of 3–5. In this context, the revenue-maximizing rate for a corporate tax on profit is below 25 percent, and we show that a tax policy that broadens the base while lowering the rate can almost double the tax revenue collected from these firms.