This paper analyzes how offshore wealth responds to greater transparency. We exploit Brazil's 2016 offshore tax amnesty, implemented just before a global agreement introduced automatic third-party reporting of foreign financial accounts. Disclosure was substantial and concentrated among the very wealthy. However, less than a quarter of disclosed wealth was repatriated, and inflows were short-lived. We find no increase in activity at firms owned by participants. Instead, repatriated capital flowed mainly into fixed-income investments. Greater transparency can thus uncover offshore wealth but is insufficient to reverse capital flight.

When income taxes and transfers are constrained, should governments redistribute through higher taxes on luxury goods? To quantify this equity-efficiency tradeoff, we exploit a large VAT reform in India that reduced tax rates on a broad set of non-essential goods. Rate cuts are partially passed through to consumer prices, generate moderate quantity responses, and induce little firm-product entry and exit or product misclassification. Together, these findings point to limited efficiency costs from differentiated commodity taxation. Combined with evidence that luxury consumption is a powerful tag for household income, our estimates imply that luxury goods should face substantially higher tax rates than standard goods under India's current tax and transfer system. We then show what it would take for uniform commodity taxation to be preferred. Achieving this benchmark requires simultaneously broadening the income tax base, increasing its progressivity, and sharply improving transfer targeting, well beyond current practice in most developing countries.

We combine population-wide administrative micro-data to provide new estimates of income inequality and effective tax rates by income groups in Brazil, capturing all income and all tax payments. Our data allow us to link businesses to their owners and thus to allocate business income and associated taxes to the corresponding individual firm owners. The top 1% earns 27.4% of total income in 2019, one of the highest levels recorded in the world. The tax system, which relies heavily on consumption taxes, is regressive: while the average tax rate in the economy is 42.5%, this rate falls to 20.6% for million-dollar earners, due to the non-taxation of dividends and provisions that reduce corporate tax liabilities.

This paper constructs new estimates of income distribution across Brazilian states from 2006 to 2019, combining survey, tax, and national accounts data within the Distributional National Accounts framework. This approach improves on survey-based measures by correcting the underrepresentation of top incomes, incorporating income components typically missing from surveys and tax records, and aligning the results with macroeconomic aggregates. The estimates reveal substantial regional differences in inequality that are not fully captured by conventional survey data, particularly because the importance of capital income varies across states. Amazonas, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo emerge as the most unequal states, with the top 1% receiving around 28% of total pre-tax income and the top 10% nearly 60%, while Amapá, Acre, Rondônia, and Santa Catarina show the lowest concentration levels. The results also suggest that income concentration remained broadly stable across states over the period analyzed. By providing harmonized state-level estimates consistent with national income, the paper offers a more accurate and internationally comparable picture of regional inequality in Brazil.

Using a newly constructed database of highly granular regional-level budgets, this paper documents the growing relevance of regional governments in Latin America over the past three decades and evaluates the implications for fiscal cyclicality. We find that regional governments exhibit lower revenue elasticity to national GDP than central governments, primarily due to the limited cyclicality of transfers. On the expenditure side, while overall elasticity is comparable to central governments, fiscal adjustment occurs through capital expenditures. We also show that transfers appear to operate primarily as redistribution mechanisms across regions rather than as instruments to offset differences in tax capacity.