Jules Ducept

We estimate the gender penalty faced by women candidates in elections. We exploit the synchronization of French national elections in a difference-in-differences design that overcomes two common identification challenges in the literature: variation in party preferences of voters and strategic allocation of women candidates. Presidential runoffs reveal local partisan preferences in gender-neutral contests, while the subsequent parliamentary races allow us to estimate party-specific gender penalties. Relative to a race between two men, a right-wing woman facing a left-wing man loses 5.2 margin points, against 2.5 for a left-wing woman. We trace these gaps to an asymmetric mobilization channel: the aligned electorate under-mobilizes when their candidate is a woman, while only right-wing voters over-mobilize against an opposing woman. A cross-sectional decomposition attributes part of the penalty to the gender gap in campaign funding, which stems primarily from private donors giving less to women, leaving a residual consistent with biased voter preferences.

This paper documents the rise of corporate tax-base narrowing measures in the EU using a novel dataset covering both tax rate and tax base reforms implemented between 2014 and 2022. Our findings indicate a shift away from the 'cut rate – broaden base' approach, as governments increasingly align corporate taxation with industrial policy objectives. We show that EU tax competition exerts downward pressure on high-tax countries, while the likelihood of tax cuts also varies with the political orientation of governments. Using financial accounts from more than 40,000 affiliates, we find that the average effective tax rate of multinational enterprises in the EU has declined more rapidly than the statutory rate and estimate that tax base reforms account for 24% of this decline. The estimated revenue cost of all reforms combined amounts to 3.5% of total corporate tax revenue collected from the sample firms. These revenue losses should be carefully weighed against the anticipated benefits of tax reforms.

Using a quasi-experimental setting, we document that corporations decrease declared profits and corporate income taxes in response to an increase in the VAT rate. In an attempt to raise tax revenue during the Greek economic crisis, a 16% VAT rate, which existed for historicopolitical reasons in Greek islands, was harmonised to the national 24% rate. We combine tax filings with Orbis and ICAP data that enable us to geolocate corporations and to construct comparable groups based on locations in or out of the preferential rate. Counteracting the reform's intended effect, declared profits decreased by 28% and corporate income taxes by 34% on a permanent basis. Macroeconomic factors and a fall in reported revenue cannot fully explain this decrease. Pervasive tax evasion in the Greek islands, where corporations might have an opportunity to adjust profits, offers a plausible explanation of the magnitude of responses.