Dina Pomeranz’s research focuses on developing countries, in particular on public finance, taxation, public procurement and firm development. Pushing the boundaries of empirical public finance research, she works closely with the governments in Chile, Ecuador and Kenya to analyze strategies to strengthen state capacity, and measure the impacts on government agencies, citizens and firms. In her work, she employs both randomized field experiments and retrospective empirical methods to demonstrate causal impacts using administrative data.
Her work on taxation demonstrates the key role of information and of technology for tax enforcement, for example in the Value Added Tax. At the same time, her work also documents how the effectiveness of information can be limited in the face of enforcement constraints or when tax payers can shift their evasion to other, less monitored margins. In ongoing work, she studies the effectiveness of international policies to curb profit shifting by multinational firms. Her work on taxation has important implications for both countries’ choice of tax instruments and for tax administration policies to help low- and middle-income countries to increase their domestic resource mobilization.
In recent work on public procurement, Pomeranz studies how inefficient audit design can have severe implications for the efficiency and fairness of the public procurement system. By failing to take bureaucrat incentives into account, audits can inadvertently distort the process towards less transparent and less competitive forms of procurement. In ongoing work, she uses detailed administrative tax data to study firm networks. Using this novel data allows her to shed light on key questions of firm development, in particular on firm-size dependent distortions, and on the impact of international trade on inequality across the economy.
Dina Pomeranz’s research focuses on developing countries, in particular on public finance, taxation, public procurement and firm development. Pushing the boundaries of empirical public finance research, she works closely with the governments in Chile, Ecuador and Kenya to analyze strategies to strengthen state capacity, and measure the impacts on government agencies, citizens and firms. In her work, she employs both randomized field experiments and retrospective empirical methods to demonstrate causal impacts using administrative data.
Her work on taxation demonstrates the key role of information and of technology for tax enforcement, for example in the Value Added Tax. At the same time, her work also documents how the effectiveness of information can be limited in the face of enforcement constraints or when tax payers can shift their evasion to other, less monitored margins. In ongoing work, she studies the effectiveness of international policies to curb profit shifting by multinational firms. Her work on taxation has important implications for both countries’ choice of tax instruments and for tax administration policies to help low- and middle-income countries to increase their domestic resource mobilization.
In recent work on public procurement, Pomeranz studies how inefficient audit design can have severe implications for the efficiency and fairness of the public procurement system. By failing to take bureaucrat incentives into account, audits can inadvertently distort the process towards less transparent and less competitive forms of procurement. In ongoing work, she uses detailed administrative tax data to study firm networks. Using this novel data allows her to shed light on key questions of firm development, in particular on firm-size dependent distortions, and on the impact of international trade on inequality across the economy.
