Evidence has shown that petroleum wealth is associated with less transparency and at the same time less tax collection. In this paper, we find that the two issues are linked through the citizens’ tax evasion behavior. We develop a model to explain this link and conduct extensive empirical tests of its validity. The explanation is that officials tradeoff greater transparency to improve tax compliance against less transparency to increase gains from corruption. Oil windfalls diminish tax revenue needs, causing officials to optimize on less transparency. Seeing this, citizens optimize on a lower level of tax compliance. At equilibrium, both decline with a positive oil shock. We also study the alternative channel in which tax compliance responds to enforcement. Transparency is found to be the more robust channel. Ignoring citizens’ strategic behavior would lead to predicting suboptimal investment in state capacity for tax enforcement. Using giant oil discoveries data combined with oil price data, we develop a dynamic composite instrument and estimate the model with a dynamic panel system generalized method of moments. We find robust support for our explanation and the model's deep structure for 130+ countries and the 1980–2010 period.

中文翻译：

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资源丰富的情况下的专政和逃税

有证据表明，石油财富与透明度降低和税收减少相关。在本文中，我们发现这两个问题是通过公民的逃税行为联系在一起的。我们开发了一个模型来解释此链接，并对其有效性进行了广泛的经验检验。原因在于，官员们为了提高税收合规性而权衡了更高的透明度，而为了增加腐败收益而降低了透明度。石油暴利减少了税收需求，导致官员们在透明度降低方面进行了优化。看到这一点，公民可以在较低的税收合规水平上进行优化。处于平衡状态时，两者都因正的油震而下降。我们还研究了税收合规响应执法的替代渠道。发现透明度是更可靠的渠道。忽视公民的战略行为将导致预测国家税收执行能力的投资不足。利用巨大的石油发现数据与石油价格数据相结合，我们开发了一种动态综合工具，并使用动态面板系统广义矩来估计该模型。我们为我们的解释和模型的发现提供了有力的支持130多个国家和1980-2010年期间的深层结构。