Abstract We evaluate the relative importance of aggregate labor productivity versus income taxes and social contributions for tax compliance in an economy with a large degree of informality. Empirical evidence points out that tax evasion in Europe happens through partially concealing wages and profits in formally registered enterprises. To this end, we build a model in which employer-employee pairs of heterogeneous productive capacities make joint decisions on the degree of tax evasion. The quantitative model is used to analyze the case of Bulgaria which has the largest informal economy in Europe and underwent a number of important tax reforms over the period 2000–2014, including the introduction of a flat income tax in 2008. The estimation strategy relies on matching the empirical series for the size of the informal economy and other aggregate outcomes for 2000–2014. Our counterfactual experiments show that the most important factor for the changing size of the informal economy is labor productivity, which accounts for more than 75% of the change. The variation in corporate income tax accounts for the rest. We find that the 2008 flat tax reform did not play any visible role in coping with informality.

中文翻译：

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信封工资，隐性生产和劳动生产率

摘要我们评估了在非正式程度较高的经济体中，总劳动生产率与所得税和社会贡献之间的相对重要性，以确保其合规性。经验证据表明，欧洲的偷税漏税是通过部分隐瞒正式注册企业的工资和利润而发生的。为此，我们建立了一个模型，在模型中，不同生产能力的雇主-雇员对共同制定了逃税程度的决定。定量模型用于分析保加利亚的情况，保加利亚是欧洲最大的非正规经济国家，并且在2000-2014年期间进行了许多重要的税制改革，包括在2008年实行统一所得税。估计策略依赖于将经验序列与非正规经济规模和2000-2014年的其他总成果相匹配。我们的反事实实验表明，影响非正规经济规模变化的最重要因素是劳动生产率，占劳动生产率变化的75％以上。公司所得税的变动占了其余部分。我们发现，2008年的统一税制改革在应对非正规性方面没有发挥任何明显的作用。