DaTax: A Lab to Study Taxes, Firms and Jobs using Micro Data

Anne Brockmeyer gave a keynote lecture entitled “Firms, Inequality and the Global Minimum Tax” at the CESifo Summer Institute workshop “Weathering the storm: The new push for international tax reform and its impacts on inequality”, which took place in Venice on June 24 and 25. The lecture presented new estimates on the revenue gains from the global minimum tax (pillar 2) in a set of lower-income countries. It led to a lively discussion about the design features of pillar 2 and the welfare consequences of using tax incentives to attract FDI.

Anne Brockmeyer traveled to Malawi and Zimbabwe during May 15-22, for workshops with the Ministries of Finance and Revenue Authorities, to discuss evidence-based tax policy design and the value of micro data analysis. The workshops were an opportunity to present DaTax and will hopefully be the start of a longer-term partnership in tax micro data analysis.

Thiago Scot and Tatiana Flores presented key findings and discussed the methodologies of two reports: (1) Two Decades of Top Income Shares in Honduras and (2) Firms’ Networks Under Export Exemption Regimes: Stylized Facts from Honduras at a joint event with the Country Office and the Service Revenue Administration (SAR) in Honduras. The event was targeted towards students and the local academic community and was held at the National Autonomous University (UNAH), with approximately 200 participants.

In this Policy Research Talk, Anne Brockmeyer, Oyebola Okunogbe and Pierre Bachas shared the latest findings from a recent symposium of papers on Taxation and Developing Countries in the Journal of Economic Perspectives that take stock of this emerging body of knowledge.

Dario Tortarolo participated as a panelist on the "International Tax Policy Seminar" at the Embassy of Estonia together with the Minister of Finance of Estonia to discuss tax policy choices and trends toward improving tax systems’ competitiveness and neutrality.

DaTax members Anne Brockmeyer, Dario Tortarolo and Thiago Scot presented work at the NBER Public Economics meetings in November 2023.