Tax evasion has been an important issue in the accounting literature for several decades, but the focus has been on corporate income taxes. We develop a new way to examine tax evasion that focuses on corporate transactions, rather than corporate profits. Specifically, we examine how commodity flows respond to destination sales taxes, allowing for tax evasion as a function of distance between trade partners. After accounting for transportation costs, we find that the effect of taxes decreases as distance increases. This is consistent with the notion that longer distances between trade partners hinder government oversight and increase the likelihood of successful tax evasion. Our results are robust with respect to outliers, strategic neighbor effects, information sharing agreements and other re-specifications. These results are important to policymakers because they evidence the difficulty of enforcing destination taxation in open economies such as U.S. states and the European Union.

A large and growing share of world trade travels by air. We model exporters' choice between fast, expensive air cargo and slow, cheap ocean cargo, which depends on the price elasticity of demand and the value that consumers attach to fast delivery. We use US imports data that provide rich variation in the premium paid for air shipping and in time lags for ocean transit to extract consumers' valuation of time. We estimate that each day in transit is equivalent to an advalorem tariff of 0.6 to 2.1 percent. The most time-sensitive trade flows involve parts and components trade.

Assessment Practices and Trends in Undergraduate Economics Courses by Georg Schaur, Michael Watts and William E. Becker. Published in volume 98, issue 2, pages 552-56 of American Economic Review, May 2008

Firms’ success in international markets depends on their product’s quality, prices, markups, and marginal cost. However, causally identified empirical evidence for the effect of trade policies that address nontariff barriers on these mechanisms is rare. To fill this gap, we exploit a quasinatural experiment in Denmark and examine the effects of an export support policy aimed at reducing nontariff barriers to trade. We find that export support raises firm-level exports within markets. However, export support does not affect prices, quality, markups, or marginal costs. Instead, the results support trade theory predicting that firms grow in export markets by shifting demand.

In this paper, we estimate the trade effects of a transit system upgrading that streamlines border processing in developing countries. Our empirical approach combines transaction-level export data from El Salvador with unique data that distinguishes export flows that were processed on the transit system. Our results indicate that the new transit system lowered regulatory border costs and raised exports. At the low end, our back-of-the-envelope estimate of the return to investment is US$ 3-to-1. This evidence informs a policy covered by the 2013 WTO Agreement of Trade Facilitation.