use and impact of information technology in indonesian commercial banks abstract efforts in 1983 by indonesia to liberalize its financial markets produced a competitive atmosphere that was a stimulus to computerization particularly in banking within four years commercial banks had applied information technology to a range of back office tasks although they still lagged behind us banks in applying it to product development and marketing the impact on productivity was negligible partly due to shortages of personnel skilled in it and inadequate telecommunications infrastructure but also because banks had not yet accumulated sufficient managerial capabilities necessary for a more competitive environment manual banking systems remain viable but probably not for long since it driven systems will eventually yield greater gains in productivity

korean telecommunications development achievements and cautionary lessons abstract telecommunications in south korea have grown rapidly under an aggressive government strategy with three components massive investment in telecommunications network alliances among government research institutions business and the academic community and policy measures to foster efficiency in managing the telecommunications sector among the accomplishments are a modern network the development of time division electronic switching tdx technology and rapid growth of value added services the korean path may not be the one to replicate changes in technology mean it is now possible to do in a more decentralized way with greater private participation what previously had been undertaken through the government

performance and potential of information technology an international perspective abstract rising information content of economic activity worldwide is making the use of information technology it increasingly relevant in a broad range of countries and activities effective planning and organizational capabilities are essential to successful adoption of the new technologies authors in this issue have concluded that managerial skills and entrepreneurship are key to effective use of it in addition to human capital development it diffusion requires a strategy for generating large investments in telecommunications while proactive measures at accelerating the diffusion of it have their place they need to be complemented by reduction of barriers to the international flow of services and investment

shaming tax delinquents abstract many federal and local governments rely on shaming penalties to achieve policy goals but little is known about how shaming works such penalties may be ineffective or even backfire by crowding out intrinsic motivation in this paper we study shaming in the context of the collection of tax delinquencies we sent letters to 34 334 tax delinquents who owed a total of half a billion dollars in three u s states we randomized some of the information contained in the letter to vary the salience of financial penalties shaming penalties and peer comparisons we then measured the effects of this information on subsequent payment rates we found that increasing the visibility of delinquency status increased compliance by individuals who have debts below 2500 but had no significant effect on individuals with larger debt amounts financial reminders had a positive effect on payment rates independent of the size of the debt while information about the delinquency of neighbors had no effect on payment rates

the distribution of the u s capital stock between residential and industrial uses the purpose of the present study is to measure the extent to which an increase in the total capital stock induces an increase in the stock of residential capital i e to measure the marginal propensity of additional capital to be absorbed in residential capital a knowledge of this propensity is important to evaluate the national return on additional saving and to understand the impact that an increased capital stock could have on labor productivity and on the composition of national output the present paper provides both a theoretical and an empirical examination of this question this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

confronting the environmental kuznets curve t he environmental kuznets curve posits an inverted u relationship between pollution and economic development kuznets s name was apparently attached to the curve by grossman and krueger 1993 who noted its resemblance to kuznets s inverted u relationship between income inequality and development in the first stage of industrialization pollution in the environmental kuznets curve world grows rapidly because people are more interested in jobs and income than clean air and water communities are too poor to pay for abatement and environmental regulation is correspondingly weak the balance shifts as income rises leading industrial sectors become cleaner people value the environment more highly and regulatory institutions become more effective along the curve pollution levels off in the middle income range and then falls toward pre industrial levels in wealthy societies the environmental kuznets curve model has elicited conflicting reactions from researchers and policymakers applied econometricians have generally accepted the basic tenets of the model and focused on measuring its parameters their regressions typically fitted to cross sectional observations across countries or regions suggest that air and water pollution increase with development until per capita income reaches a range of 5000 to 8000 when income rises beyond that level pollution starts to decline as shown in the conventional ekc line in figure 1 in developing countries some policymakers have interpreted such results as conveying a message about priorities grow first then clean up numerous critics have challenged the conventional environmental kuznets curve both as a representation of what actually happens in the development process and as a policy prescription some pessimistic critics argue that crosssectional evidence for the environmental kuznets curve is nothing more than a

payoffs from investment in information technology lessons from the asia pacific region abstract this paper examines the factors influencing investment in information technology it and the payoffs from investment in it use on productivity and economic growth in 12 asia pacific countries for 1984 1990 it finds a significant positive correlation between growth in it investment and growth in both gdp and productivity over the seven year period countries with higher growth rates in it investment achieved consistently higher growth rates of gdp and productivity this finding is consistent with the notion of it led development it challenges the so called productivity paradox or the notion that investment in it has not paid off in productivity improvements

psychological frictions and the incomplete take up of social benefits evidence from an irs field experiment we address the role of psychological frictions in the incomplete take up of eitc benefits with an irs field experiment we specifically assess the influence of program confusion informational complexity and stigma by evaluating response to experimental mailings distributed to 35 050 tax filers who failed to claim 26 million despite an initial notice while the mere receipt of the mailing simplification and the heightened salience of benefits led to substantial additional claiming attempts to reduce perceived costs of stigma application and audits did not the study and accompanying surveys suggests that low program awareness understanding and informational complexity contribute to the puzzle of low take up jel c93 d03 h24 m38

taxation with costly administration the concept of a tax technology is used here as providing a unified framework for analyzing both administrative activity by tax authorities and tax resisting activity by taxpayers this framework provides a simple formalization of adam smith s four components of tax costs administration substitution active noncompliance and passive compliance the model is used to derive policy implications concerning the proper measurement of the cost of public funds and concerning the criterion for optimal administration

no taxation without information deterrence and self enforcement in the value added tax abstract claims that the vat facilitates tax enforcement by generating paper trails on transactions between firms contributed to widespread vat adoption worldwide but there is surprisingly little evidence this paper analyzes the role of third party information for vat enforcement through two randomized experiments among over 400 000 chilean firms announcing additional monitoring has less impact on transactions that are subject to a paper trail indicating the paper trail s preventive deterrence effect this leads to strong enforcement spillovers up the vat chain these findings confirm that when taking evasion into account significant differences emerge between otherwise equivalent forms of taxation jel d83 h25 h26 k34 o17

reminders and recidivism using administrative data to characterize nonfilers and conduct eitc outreach this project uses third party information reporting and population level administrative tax data to identify the population of nonfilers this population consists of individuals who do not file a tax return despite having income reported by third parties to the united states internal revenue service after identifying and characterizing this population we identified nonfilers who may have been eligible for earned income tax credit eitc benefits using an experimental sample drawn from this population of potentially eitc eligible nonfilers we conducted two randomized controlled trials to test multiple hypotheses regarding inattention and recency effects in these low income earners tax filing decisions

the use of field experiments to increase tax compliance governments have become increasingly interested in the explosion of research into taxpayer behaviour this article briefly reviews two main theories of tax compliance deterrence and non deterrence before discussing the recent rapid rise of natural field experiments nfes in this area these nfes represent a win win for policy makers and academics since they can test theories while also evaluating the impact of a specific intervention in the real world the evidence from nfes shows that deterrence approaches improve compliance while the case for non deterrence approaches is less conclusive at the moment nfes could be improved by paying more attention to findings from behavioural science that apparently incidental factors such as timing framing and complexity substantially affect whether compliance occurs or not new directions for future studies include network effects tax payments in addition to declarations the behaviour of firms the provision of public goods and the relationship between attitudes and behaviour

ghostbusting in detroit evidence on nonfilers from a controlled field experiment abstract many people who owe income tax fail to file a timely tax return in communication with these ghosts what messages from the tax authority are effective for eliciting a return this is the first study to address message content in communication with income tax nonfilers i assess the efficacy of messages related to penalty salience punishment probability compliance cost and civic pride by evaluating the response to experimental mailings distributed by detroit to 7142 suspected resident nonfilers the penalty salience message was the most effective relative to a basic mailing that requested a return penalty salience mailings that stated the statutory penalty for failing to file a return tripled response rates from 3 to 10 compliance cost mailings that enclosed a blank tax return and punishment probability mailings that stated the recipient s federal income also raised response rates relative to the basic mailing but civic pride mailings did not i investigate the impact of treatment mailings on the behavior of untreated neighbors and find no evidence of geographic network effects

taxpayer response to an increased probability of audit evidence from a controlled experiment in minnesota abstract in 1995 a group of 1724 randomly selected minnesota taxpayers was informed by letter that the returns they were about to file would be closely examined compared to a control group that did not receive this letter low and middle income taxpayers in the treatment group on average increased tax payments compared to the previous year which we interpret as indicating the presence of noncompliance the effect was much stronger for those with more opportunity to evade in fact the difference in differences is not statistically significant for those who do not have self employment or farm income and do not pay estimated tax surprisingly however the reported tax liability of the high income treatment group fell sharply relative to the control group

exploiting information technology a case study of singapore abstract while many developed nations and newly industrializing economies have major initiatives to promote information technology it singapore has perhaps had the most comprehensive and coordinated effort of all singapore s experience represents a good example of a very proactive government strategy elements of the government strategy include skills development state of the art telecommunications funding for small to medium sized it companies an international approach to standardization and special demonstration projects singapore s success with it could be largely attributed to its compactness however one can also take the view that singapore s highly sophisticated it infrastracture is an early indication of the infrastructure requirements in developing countries

the optimal size of a tax collection agency the condition that characterizes the optimal size of a tax collection agency is derived and then given a simple interpretation in terms of excess burden the paper clarifies an earlier finding of sandmo which suggests that the optimal degree of enforcement is higher than a simple cost benefit calculation would indicate the appropriate condition is that at the margin the resource cost of increasing enforcement should equal the saving of excess burden due to the decline in exposure to risk the increased revenue gained from stricter enforcement does not enter the expression because it merely represents a transfer among the economy s identical agents

the location of overseas production and production for export by u s multinational firms abstract the location of overseas manufacturing production is influenced by common factors that operate in all industries notably proximity to the united states and to other markets within industries opposites attract low wage and low capital intensity parents choose high wage countries production for export is attracted by large internal markets in host countries economies of scale in production presumably make large markets economical as export bases another factor is high trade propensities of host countries u s firms tend to export from high wage countries but labor cost is not in general a major influence on the location of export production

electronic filing tax preparers and participation in the earned income tax credit abstract in 2002 more than 18 million low income individual taxpayers received the earned income tax credit eitc despite its size non participation in this program is a concern and substantial effort is devoted by the irs local governments and many non profits to address it using variation across states in the introduction of state electronic filing programs we show that the introduction of electronic filing had a significant effect on participation in the eitc our results are robust to accounting for other welfare eitc and irs reforms introduced during the same period we speculate that the impact of this policy change on the tax preparation industry played an important role in increasing participation

the allocation of capital between residential and nonresidential uses taxes inflation and capital market constraints we have constructed a simple two sector model of the demand for housing and corporate capital economic growth and an increase in the inflation rate were then simulated with a number of model variants the model and simulation experiments illustrate both the tax bias in favor of housing and the manner in which the increase in inflation between 1965 and 1978 magnified it the existence of capital market constraints offsets the bias against corporate capital but it introduces a sharp inefficient reallocation of housing from less wealthy constrained households to wealthy households who do not have gains on mortgages and are not financially constrained

investment climate and fdi in developing countries firm level evidence this paper uses firm level data across 77 developing countries to show that constraints related to investment climate hamper foreign direct investment fdi the main results show that physical infrastructure problems financing constraints and institutional problems discourage fdi these results are robust to an alternative definition of fdi introduction of additional explanatory variables and some breakdown analyses different sectors of activity and comparison between sub saharan africa and other developing countries the results also highlight that exporter foreign firms are more constrained in their activity by physical infrastructure hurdles and the lack of skilled workers compared to firms supplying the domestic market

investing to cooperate theory and experiment we study theoretically and in a lab experiment investment decisions in environments where property rights are absent in our setting a player chooses an investment level before interacting repeatedly with a given set of agents the investment stochastically affects the payoffs of the game in every subsequent period we show that more volatile returns make investment more difficult in the absence of legal protection and might force the investor to invest more to guarantee cooperation experimental results are broadly consistent with the theoretical findings

heard it through the grapevine the direct and network effects of a tax enforcement field experiment on firms abstract tax enforcement may have deterrent effects that extend beyond directly treated taxpayers but evidence of such deterrent effects for major sources of revenue is limited this paper studies the effects of a large scale field experiment on employer deposits that make up most u s tax collections in person visits by revenue officers have a large direct effect on visited firms tax deposits the other clients of visited firms tax preparers also deposit more tax a network effect that suggests preparers disseminate information aggregating over all links this network effect accounts for 1 2 times as much revenue as the direct effect letters conveying the same message are found to have much smaller direct effects and no measurable network effects

optimal tax administration abstract this paper sets out a framework for analyzing optimal interventions by a tax administration one that parallels and can be closely integrated with established frameworks for thinking about optimal tax policy its key contribution is the development of a summary measure of the impact of administrative interventions the enforcement elasticity of tax revenue that is a sufficient statistic for the behavioral response to such interventions much as the elasticity of taxable income serves as a sufficient statistic for the response to tax rates among the applications are characterizations of the optimal balance between policy and administrative measures and of the optimal compliance gap

why are products sold on sale explanations of pricing regularities this paper reports on interesting changes in markdown pricing practices over time and differences in the pricing within a product line the price discrimination and the uncertainty hypotheses appear to better explain the data than the peak load hypothesis fashion has become more important over time and appears to explain the greater seasonal variation in retail apparel prices in recent years differences in uncertainty also explains differences in the pricing of different types of men s dress shirts

determinants of the adoption of information technology a case study of electrical and electronic goods manufacturing firms in india abstract this study measures the intensity of adoption of information technology it and identifies its determinants in this paper it is argued that the degree of it adoption will be determined by the variables such as entrepreneurship skill intensity government policy openness of economy competitive environment and other firm specific factors the results of ordered probit model suggest that the qualification and information base of entrepreneurs and their attitude towards innovative activities and market share are significant determinants of the degree of it adoption the results also indicate that size of operations and skill intensity of the firms influenced the extent of it use

internationalization of information technology services and public policy implications abstract world telecommunications traffic grew at a rate of over 15 a year in the 1980s substantially faster than merchandise or service trade the growth of such traffic is linked closely to the international flow of services and investment economizing on time inventories and financial balances are important considerations in the use of international telecommunications networks at the same time network providers are engaging in international alliances to supply a variety of telecommunication services across borders these alliances will influence strongly the further evolution of national and international regulatory regimes an international regime more open in the trade of services and movement of investment is called for

when is cheap cheap enough to bridge the digital divide modeling income related structural challenges of technology diffusion in latin america summary the article presents a model that shows how income structures create diffusion patterns of information and communication technologies icts the model allows the creation of scenarios for potential cuts in access prices and or required subsidies for household spending in mexico uruguay brazil and costa rica one analyzed scenario would require the reduction of ict prices to as low as 4 of the current price levels to us 0 75 per month or alternatively a subsidy as high as 6 2 of gdp a figure comparable to public spending on education plus health this is the income reality of the poor neither existing technological solutions nor existing financial mechanisms are sufficient to cope with this economic reality the alternatives such as a prolonged period of public access are discussed

the volatility of offshore investment abstract offshore investment often bears the image of footloose industry with little to hinder movement to the most favorable environment an effort to describe this particular segment of u s direct investment supports some elements of the colorful anecdotal portrait painted by critics in the third world semiconductor assemblers are moderately sensitive to wage rates and adjust quite rapidly in maintaining what they perceive as a diversified portfolio of risky ldc production locations on the other hand this reaction is small enough to guarantee that modest increases in wages will not send all investment fleeing from an export platform new methods of modelling direct foreign investment when risk diversification is important in explaining industrial location decisions are introduced in this paper

international investment location decisions abstract in international location tournaments governments compete for foreign investment with tax and other short run incentives such tournaments can be won if agglomeration economies are sufficiently powerful to overcome investors desire to spread investments as a hedge against risk we focus on manufacturing investments by u s multinationals in the 1980s our econometric results suggest that agglomeration economies are indeed the dominant influence on investor calculations paradoxically short run incentives have limited apparent impact on location choice we conclude that high cost tournament play is unnecessary for countries with good infrastructure development specialized input suppliers and an expanding domestic market

foreign direct investment and local linkages this paper analyses the pattern of local linkages in foreign direct investment fdi treating such local linkages as an investment in local relationships using taiwanese manufacturing firms investing abroad as the sample for our case study we find that the local linkage intensity of a foreign subsidiary differs by fdi location entry mode firm size and the nature of the production network in which an investor is embedded more local linkages will be pursued by an investor if it is in search of distinctive and inimitable resources as opposed to homogeneous and reproducible resources investment in local linkages always begins with the linkage that carries the lowest risk to the original business network for manufacturing firms the sequence of such linkages is workers components and parts subcontracting and finally sources of r d

multinational enterprises and wage costs vertical fdi revisited abstract this study explores how wage costs for high skilled and less skilled labor in host countries affect the level of affiliate activities conducted by foreign mnes we find support for vertical fdi in the sense that more fdi is conducted in countries where less skilled labor is relatively cheap in addition we find that skilled wage cost premia also affect fdi activities previously associated with horizontal fdi i e local affiliate sales consequently the potential effects of relative wage costs on mne activities are large rough calculations suggest that more than 20 percent of us affiliate sales in 1998 can be attributed to skilled wage cost premia