Tax enforcement is especially costly when market participants are difficult to observe. The benefits of enforcement depend crucially on pre-enforcement compliance. We derive an upper bound on pre-enforcement compliance from the pass-through of newlyenforced taxes. Using data on Airbnb listings and the platform's voluntary collection agreements, we find that taxes are paid on, at most, 24 percent of Airbnb transactions prior to enforcement. We also find that demand for Airbnb listings is inelastic, driving three key insights: the tax burden falls disproportionately on renters, excess burden is small, and tax enforcement is relatively ineffective at reducing local Airbnb activity.
Vast organ shortages motivated recent efforts to increase the supply of transplantable organs, but we know little about the demand side of the market. We test the implications of a model of organ demand using the universe of US transplant data from 1987 to 2013. Exploiting variation in supply induced by state-level motorcycle helmet laws, we demonstrate that each organ that becomes available from a deceased donor in a particular region induces five transplant candidates to join that region's transplant wait list, while crowding out living-donor transplants. Even with the corresponding demand increase, positive supply shocks increase post-transplant survival rates. (JEL D47, I11, I18)
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.