Read my lips? Taxes and elections

Arbeitspapier

Research on many important questions on taxation is impeded by a lack of cross-nationally comparable data. We introduce a new dataset that includes quantitative harmonized indices of tax reforms based on qualitative information of about 900 Economic Surveys from the OECD and 37,000 tax-related news from the IBFD archives collected by the IMF (Amaglobeli et al., 2018). Our dataset provides indicators on tax reforms for tax rates and tax bases, along with detailed sub-indices for six types of taxes (23 countries, 1960-2014). Relating tax reforms to the timing of elections, we provide first empirical evidence on electoral cycles in tax reforms on the national level. Our results show that politicians postpone tax rate increases to after elections. Examining heterogeneity across tax types, we find that electoral cycles are particularly pronounced for value added tax rates and personal income tax rates.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: EconPol Working Paper ; No. 71

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior ; Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue: General ; Business Taxes and Subsidies including sales and value-added (VAT) ; Single Equation Models; Single Variables: Panel Data Models; Spatio-temporal Models
• Subject: Tax reforms ; tax systems ; tax rates ; tax bases ; data set ; electoral cycles

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Fuest, Clemens ; Gründler, Klaus ; Potrafke, Niklas ; Ruthardt, Fabian
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich
• (where): Munich
• (when): 2022

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/272954
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET