Local Corruption and Misreported Income: Evidence from the Earned Income Tax Credit
| dc.contributor.author | Berkes, Enrico | |
| dc.contributor.author | Marchingiglio, Riccardo | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2023-11-13T15:46:43Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2023-11-13T15:46:43Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2017-07-07 | |
| dc.description.abstract | We study the relationship between local corruption and income misreporting in the context of the EITC program. Using a newly assembled dataset of corruption at the MSA level, we observe that public officials’ corruption predicts more than 70% of the variation in bunching in the distribution of EITC-eligible self-employed workers’ reported income. Using a research design that exploits exogenous variation in institutional accountability, we find that a one standard deviation rise in our corruption measure causes sharp bunching among self-employed to increase by 0.60 to 0.83 standard deviations. This is consistent with a behavioral model that embeds social stigma. | en_US |
| dc.description.sponsorship | We thank Matthias Doepke, David Figlio, Ruben Gaetani, Lorenz Kueng, Matthew Notowidigdo and Paola Sapienza for their comments. We thank seminar participants at the Department of Economics at Northwestern University and attendees of the 2016 Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Corruption. A special thanks goes to Alexey Makarin for detailed comments on an early version of the paper. This research was partly funded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and by Susan Schmidt Bies. The contents of the paper are solely our responsibility. | |
| dc.format.extent | 33 pages | en_US |
| dc.genre | journal articles | en_US |
| dc.genre | preprints | en_US |
| dc.identifier | doi:10.13016/m27h3k-hizx | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/11603/30712 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | en_US |
| dc.relation.isAvailableAt | The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) | |
| dc.relation.ispartof | UMBC Economics Department Collection | |
| dc.rights | This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author. | en_US |
| dc.title | Local Corruption and Misreported Income: Evidence from the Earned Income Tax Credit | en_US |
| dc.type | Text | en_US |
| dcterms.creator | https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5117-9918 | en_US |