Usar los datos de los préstamos bancarios para determinar el grado de evasión fiscal

Banks adapt to the culture of semiformality and provide credit to individuals based on their inference of true income. An interesting observation about credit given on taxed-evaded income is that the process dampens Stiglitz-Weiss (1981) credit rationing that would have occurred because of the unobservability of semiformal income. Thus, the fact that banks make an inference as to true income increases the overall pie of credit issued. Because the income inference is soft information, we call this expansion of credit, soft credit.

On average, self-employed Greeks spend 82% of their monthly reported income servicing debt. To put this number in perspective, the standard practice in consumer …finance (in the United States as well as Greece) is to never lend to borrowers such that loan payments are greater than 30% of monthly income. And that is the upper limit.

A number of banks in southern Europe told us point blank that they have adaptation formulas to adjust clients’ reported income to the bank’s best estimate of true income, and furthermore, that these adjustments are specifi…c to occupations.

… the private data methodology offers an opportunity to uncover hidden income in places where using the other methods might prove difficult.

Our approach to estimate true income from bank data is based on a causal relationship that individuals must have income (or ‡flows from wealth) to service debt. When individuals apply for bank credit or a payment product, a bank officer applies a decision model to determine whether and to what extent the individual quali…fies. These credit decision models utilize a host of risk- and wealth-profi…ling variables, but by far the most important factor in determining credit worthiness is true income. True income is, however, not observable, and so the bank applies adaptation rules to offer soft credit on their best estimate of true income, given the reported income. … the standard assumption in the tax evasion literature that reported income is equal to true income for wage earners

When industries use inputs and produce outputs with paper trails, they are less likely to tax evade.

We were motivated to pursue this story by the failure of a legislative bill in the Greek Parliament in 2010. The idea of the bill was to mandate tax audits for reported income below a minimum amount, targeted at eleven select occupations. The occupations line up almost perfectly with our results: doctors, dentists, veterinarians, lawyers, architects, engineers, topographer engineers, economists, fi…rm consultants and accountants. Our political economy story is that parliamentarians lacking the willpower to pass tax reform may have personal incentive related to their industry associations, which are very strong in Greece. We fi…nd that indeed the occupations represented in Parliament are very much those which tax evade, even beyond lawyers. Half of non-lawyer parliamentarians are in the top three tax evading industries, and nearly a supermajority in the top four evading industrie.

access to soft credit reduces the costs to informality,

Artavanis, Nikolaos T., Morse, Adair and Tsoutsoura, Margarita, Tax Evasion Across Industries: Soft Credit Evidence from Greece (June 25, 2012). Chicago Booth Research Paper No. 12-25; Fama-Miller Working Paper. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2109500