Tax administrations in low-and middle-income countries have been introducing technological innovations to improve tax compliance and boost revenue collection. This study evaluates the impacts of e-filing adoption, first introduced in late 2011, on corporate income tax (CIT) compliance in Ethiopia using tax administrative panel data spanning between 2008 and 20219. Employing a modified difference-in-difference approach by de Chaisemartin and d’Haultfoeuille (2024), which is robust to heterogeneous and dynamic treatment effects, the study documents three findings. First, e-filing adoption reduces the likelihood of being late in CIT filing on average by 7 percentage points. Second, there is no evidence that the e-filing adoption increases the amount of CIT liabilities. Third, the results on gross income and total expenses suggest that taxpayers play smartly to avoid paying higher taxes. Moreover, evidence from focus group discussions compliment the empirical findings that the technology reduces compliance costs for the tax administration and taxpayers.

We study the impact of tax preparers on corporate tax optimization in South Africa. The analysis draws on the population of corporate tax returns linked to data on tax preparer use. Consistent with frictions from tax code complexity, we document that tax preparer take-up is associated with a significant decline in firms’ reported taxable income and tax payments. Additional analyses show that the use of a tax preparer increases the take-up of tax advantages: Eligible firms become more likely to seek access to a regime with special low tax rates; they are more likely to claim employment tax incentives for the young and to run losses. The observed effects imply that the application of tax laws differs across firms with and without tax preparer. The same holds true for the effectiveness of tax incentives: The use of a tax preparer significantly increases the propensity to employ young and eligible workers.

Does simplification increase firms’ compliance with value-added tax (VAT)? We exploit

the 2021 EU VAT e-commerce package to investigate whether simplified registration and reporting in the cross-border e-commerce sector incentivizes firms to change VAT reporting behavior. Using administrative foreign trade statistics, VAT returns, and customs data from Germany in difference-in-differences and bunching designs, we evaluate whether the introduction of the One Stop Shop (OSS) and the Import One Stop Shop (IOSS) increased reported cross-border sales and respective VAT revenue. In addition, we conduct a survey among German firms to gain a deeper understanding of how firms reacted to the reform.

This paper leverages a large tax-benefit policy with administrative data from the state of Sao Paulo in Brazil to document the economic impact on firms' behavioral responses and correspondent tax collection. Our analysis compares treated firms—primarily within the textile and clothing industries—exposed to an increase in the presumptive tax credit against comparable firms, most of which are in the footwear industry, a closely related industrial sector not yet affected during the analyzed period. We employ a dynamic difference-in-differences strategy to document a positive (11%) effect on reported sales and purchases only in the year after its implementation without affecting tax collection and the number of firms in these sectors. Last, we explore a synthetic control strategy at the industry level to find a (positive) negative effect on formal jobs in the (textile) clothing sector without any significant aggregated effect aggregated impact on formal employment and wages.