To investigate the enforcement value of third-party information on potentially collusive taxpayers, I study an anti-tax evasion program that rewards consumers for ensuring that firms report sales and establishes a verification system to aid whistle-blowing consumers in São Paulo, Brazil (Nota Fiscal Paulista). Firms reported sales increased by at least 21 percent over 4 years. The results are consistent with fixed costs of concealing collusion, increased detection probability from whistle-blower threats, and with behavioral biases associated with lotteries amplifying the enforcement value of the program. Although firms increased reported expenses, tax revenue net of rewards increased by 9.3 percent.

We study the spending profile of workers who experience both a positive transitory income shock (lump-sum severance pay) and a negative permanent income shock (layoff). Using de-identified expenditure and employment data from Brazil, we show that workers increase spending at layoff by 35 percent despite experiencing a 14 percent long-term loss. We find high sensitivity of spending to cash-on-hand across consumption categories and for several sources of variation, including predictable income drops. A model with present-biased workers can rationalize our findings, and highlights the importance of the timing of benefit disbursement for the consumption-smoothing gains of job displacement insurance policies.