Calendrier du 22 septembre 2023
EU Tax Observatory Seminar
Du 22/09/2023 de 12:00 à 13:00
Salle R1-14
DUBININA Evgenyia (Charles University)
Online Cash Register Policy in Russia: Impact on Prices and Exit Decisions
To achieve better tax compliance, the Russian government required small firms to use online cash registers (OCRs) for business-to-consumer transactions from 2017. For firms, the installation of the OCR leads to an increase in fixed costs and marginal markup that depends on production output. This might push firms to increase prices, to switch to the shadow market, to exit the market, or to combine the first two strategies. Using Regression Discontinuity Design technique, I estimate the effect of OCR policy on regional tax revenues. Using the Difference-in-Difference technique, I estimate the effects of the OCR policy on business activity changes and firms' exit decisions. Exogenous variation for causal inference is possible thanks to different years of policy implementation (2017, 2018). The research findings may be useful to help policymakers address the question of firms' behavior after the OCR policy implementation.
PSE Internal Seminar
Du 22/09/2023 de 12:00 à 13:00
GOEDDE Julius()
ALTMANN Samuel(PSE)
*Satiation, unraveling and compressing prices. Designing peer-to-peer platforms with internal currencies
I examine how peer-to-peer sharing platforms that use internal currencies instead of real
money should set prices. Individuals must earn currency by supplying on the platform
and can only spend it by consuming on the same platform. Beyond this difference, such
systems often mimic real markets where prices equalize demand and supply. I argue that
non-market-clearing prices can be superior. As individuals typically only have a limited
demand for the specific goods on the platform, some may become satiated and reduce their
supply. This might induce others to reduce their supply in turn and thus lead to unraveling.
I illustrate with a stylized model of a dynamic exchange economy that reducing the price of
attractive goods may increase their supply and aggregate welfare. In the empirical part, I
focus on a widely-used platform for exchanging holiday homes. Using proprietary data on
the universe of transactions I confirm key predictions of the model. My results suggest that
satiation is quantitatively important. Thus, compressed prices might indeed improve upon
market-clearing prices - despite possible side-effects like misallocation. A broader insight is
that lessons from traditional markets may not easily extend to markets without real money.
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Feeding America, an organisation responsible for feeding 130,000 Americans every day, distributes donated food among a network of participating food banks. Feeding America’s allocation mechanism, the ‘Choice System’, uses first-price auctions to allow food banks to signal which types of food they need from Feeding America. This provides food banks a large degree of choice over the types of food they receive. This paper examines the welfare and distributional consequences of enabling this choice. I apply a dynamic auction model to Choice System bidding data, estimating the distribution of food banks’ heterogeneous and time-varying needs. I then use these estimates to compare the Choice System to the previous allocation mechanism employed by Feeding America which gave food banks very limited choice. I estimate that the Choice System increased welfare by the equivalent of a 17.1% increase in the quantity of food being allocated.