Working Paper
How large is the wage penalty in the labour broker sector?
Public debate on the temporary employment services, or labour broker, sector in South Africa has focused on temporary workers’ wages and benefits. Empirical research is limited: temporary employment services cannot be accurately identified in recent...
Working Paper
Taxpayer response to greater progressivity
We evaluate a major personal income tax reform in Uganda that came into effect in 2012–13, contributing to the scarce literature on the effects of personal income tax reform on employees’ income in a low-income country in Africa. The reform increased...
Working Paper
How have formal firms recovered from the pandemic?
This paper examines how formal firms have been impacted by and recovered from the pandemic by drawing on two distinct but complementary data sources. This is the first attempt to use both survey and tax administrative data to measure the initial...
Working Paper
Top earners and earnings inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic
This paper aims to assess the extent to which top earners in Ecuador were affected by the COVID-19 crisis compared to other segments of the population.Our analysis uses administrative data for individuals affiliated to social security between January...
Working Paper
Estimating the distribution of household wealth in South Africa
This paper estimates the distribution of personal wealth in South Africa by combining tax microdata, household surveys, and macroeconomic balance sheet statistics. We systematically compare estimates of the wealth distribution obtained by direct...
Working Paper
What explains the gender gap in top incomes in developing countries?
Based on tax records data from Ecuador, we analyse gender differences in top income groups from 2008 to 2017. Ecuador represents an interesting case as it shares many trends with other countries in the region in terms of women’s status in the labour...
Background Note
Building tax data for research
Introduction: data for development Globally, one of the key factors associated with increasing use of data to inform policy-making has been the increased availability of new administrative data sources. In 2014, the National Treasury of South Africa...
Technical Note
The Uganda Revenue Authority firm panel
This technical note describes the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) firm panel, which is constructed from administrative corporate income tax (CIT) returns and firm registration data for the financial years 2013/14–2019/20. The panel dataset contains...
Working Paper
The guide to the CIT-IRP5 panel version 4.0
This paper presents version 4.0 of the CIT-IRP5 firm-level panel dataset. Version 4.0 is the latest edition of the firm-level component of the combined administrative data using sources from the South African Revenue Service. We show that differences...
Technical Note
Total factor productivity in South African manufacturing firms 2010–17
We update Kreuser and Newman’s (2018) total factor productivity estimates for the South African manufacturing sector using administrative data from 2009–17. We use standard implementations of the Ackerberg et al. (2015) and Wooldridge (2009)...
Working Paper
The effects of a risk-based approach to tax examinations
While technical assistance and increased use of ICT in the area of tax administration have been regarded to hold considerable promise for greater revenue collection, the evidence on how these activities work in the real-world circumstances of...
Technical Note
The Uganda Revenue Authority trade data
This Technical Note describes Ugandan trade data covering import and export declarations for ten calendar years from January 2013 to December 2022, constructed from transactional-level Ugandan administrative data. The trade data series contains...
Working Paper
The dynamics of formal employment during and after the COVID-19 pandemic in Uganda
This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on formal sector employment in Uganda. Utilizing employee-level administrative tax data from the Uganda Revenue Authority, we describe the dynamics of employment as the pandemic evolved, seeking...
Journal Article
How have formal firms recovered from the pandemic?
THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This study examines how formal firms have been impacted by and recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, by drawing on two distinct but complementary data sources. This is the first attempt to use both survey and tax...
Working Paper
Top incomes’ impacts on inequality, growth, and social welfare
This paper evaluates the impacts of combining household surveys with income tax return files, in terms of growth, inequality, and social welfare in Brazil from 2007 to 2015. This exercise holds the promise of adding more realistic top income values...
Working Paper
Can a wage subsidy system help reduce 50 per cent youth unemployment?
The paper examines the incidence and employment impacts of the Employment Tax Incentive, a South African wage subsidy system that is targeted at the employers of low-wage youth. The paper uses a triple differences strategy and survey and...
Working Paper
Gender and the South African labour market
This paper has three primary objectives. First, it provides a broad overview of the available South African data used to examine gender in the labour market, with specific reference to the South African Revenue Services (SARS) tax data which has...
Working Paper
The size distribution of monetary policy effects among South African manufacturing firms
Monetary policy is believed to have a disproportionate effect on firms, depending on their size. Financially constrained firms with limited access to capital markets are expected to be more sensitive to changes in interest rates; this is...
Working Paper
Measuring wealth inequality in South Africa
Understanding wealth inequality has unique significance in South Africa. The co-existence of extreme poverty and extreme wealth is starkly visible. Apartheid-era inequality has persisted despite more than 20 years of democracy. Much of the research...
Working Paper
Earnings and employment microdata in South Africa
Traditionally, analysts of the South African labour market have used household survey data to describe earnings and employment in the post-Apartheid period. More recently, administrative data from the South African Revenue Service has been made...
Research Brief
Monetary policy and firm size in South Africa
Monetary policy affects the real economy through various channels, including the interest rate, exchange rate, credit, and asset price channels. The credit channel has recently received considerable attention. Small firms are more sensitive to...
Working Paper
The effects of personal income tax reform on employees’ taxable income in Uganda
We evaluate a major personal income tax reform in Uganda that came into effect in 2012–13. The reform increased the tax-free lower threshold, increased tax rates for higher incomes, and introduced an additional highest tax band. Using the universe of...
Research Brief
Extreme inequalities
South Africa is, by most contemporary measures, the most unequal country in the world. Yet, relatively little attention has been given to country’s wealth inequality. It is crucial to accurately measure the concentration of wealth inequality over...
Working Paper
The impact of employment protection on the temporary employment services sector
Attempts to regulate the temporary employment sector have had mixed results internationally. In South Africa, temporary employment was regulated in 2015 through amendments to the Labour Relations Act. This paper uses administrative data to examine...
Working Paper
Industry classification in the South African tax microdata
This paper documents the industry classification variables in the anonymized tax microdata available for research at the National Treasury Secure Data Facility in Pretoria. It discusses how the variables in the data are related to the raw records...
Working Paper
Mobile technologies and firm formalization
We investigate how the arrival and expansion of mobile network access in Uganda influences firm tax behaviour. Access to mobile technologies could broaden government revenues from corporate income tax through the extensive margin: by reducing the...
Technical Note
The Uganda Revenue Authority Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) data
This technical note describes the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) data covering financial years 2013/14 to 2021/22. PAYE is paid by an employer who withholds personal income tax on employees’ wages and other employment incomes...
Working Paper
Firm-level determinants of earnings in the formal sector of the South African labour market
Labour market analysis in the South African context provides a relatively robust understanding of the individual characteristics that influence wage differentials across workers (i.e. supply-side characteristics), but provides relatively little...
Working Paper
The creation of an individual panel using administrative tax microdata in South Africa
The availability of anonymized individual tax return data can contribute to a deeper understanding of the drivers behind the high levels of inequality and unemployment in South Africa. In the recent past, researchers have examined either payroll or...
Working Paper
Measuring earnings inequality in South Africa using household survey and administrative tax microdata
Overall income inequality in South Africa is very high, and inequality generated in the labour market is a key driver of inequality.In this paper, I use the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series, the General Household Surveys, and administrative tax...