IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ecolet/v99y2008i3p557-560.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The impact of sales taxation on internet commerce -- An empirical analysis

Author

Listed:
  • Ahmed, Shamim
  • Wirjanto, Tony S.

Abstract

This paper examines how sales taxation on Internet purchases could affect the decision to buy goods over the Internet. The results appear robust with respect to unobserved technological sophistication or other alternative explanations. The tax effect is found to be significant and its magnitude suggests that applying a provincial average sales tax of 14% to all Internet sales in Canada would reduce the number of online buyers by as much as 44%.

Suggested Citation

  • Ahmed, Shamim & Wirjanto, Tony S., 2008. "The impact of sales taxation on internet commerce -- An empirical analysis," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 99(3), pages 557-560, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:99:y:2008:i:3:p:557-560
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165-1765(07)00377-1
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Glenn Ellison & Sara Fisher Ellison, 2006. "Internet Retail Demand: Taxes, Geography, and Online-Offline Competition," NBER Working Papers 12242, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Austan Goolsbee, 2000. "In a World Without Borders: The Impact of Taxes on Internet Commerce," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 115(2), pages 561-576.
    3. Glenn Ellison & Sara Fisher Ellison, 2005. "Lessons About Markets from the Internet," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 19(2), pages 139-158, Spring.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Wen-Chung Guo & Fu-Chuan Lai, 2017. "Prices, Locations and Welfare When an Online Retailer Competes with Heterogeneous Brick-and-Mortar Retailers," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 65(2), pages 439-468, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Glenn Ellison & Sara Fisher Ellison, 2006. "Internet Retail Demand: Taxes, Geography, and Online-Offline Competition," NBER Working Papers 12242, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Watanabe, Makoto, 2008. "Inflation, price competition, and consumer search technology," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 32(12), pages 3780-3806, December.
    3. Ratchford, Brian T., 2009. "Online Pricing: Review and Directions for Research," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 23(1), pages 82-90.
    4. Grewal, Dhruv & Janakiraman, Ramkumar & Kalyanam, Kirthi & Kannan, P.K. & Ratchford, Brian & Song, Reo & Tolerico, Stephen, 2010. "Strategic Online and Offline Retail Pricing: A Review and Research Agenda," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 24(2), pages 138-154.
    5. Lesley Chiou & Erich Muehlegger, 2014. "Consumer Response to Cigarette Excise Tax Changes," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 67(3), pages 621-650, September.
    6. Prabirendra Chatterjee & Bo Zhou, 2021. "Sponsored Content Advertising in a Two-Sided Market," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(12), pages 7560-7574, December.
    7. Victor Stango & Jonathan Zinman, 2014. "Limited and Varying Consumer Attention: Evidence from Shocks to the Salience of Bank Overdraft Fees," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 27(4), pages 990-1030.
    8. Haoying Wang, 2018. "Pricing used books on Amazon.com: a spatial approach to price dispersion," Spatial Economic Analysis, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 13(1), pages 99-117, January.
    9. Justus Haucap & Ulrich Heimeshoff, 2014. "Google, Facebook, Amazon, eBay: Is the Internet driving competition or market monopolization?," International Economics and Economic Policy, Springer, vol. 11(1), pages 49-61, February.
    10. Kolko, Jed, 2010. "How broadband changes online and offline behaviors," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 22(2), pages 144-152, May.
    11. Rapson, David & Schiraldi, Pasquale, 2013. "Internet and the efficiency of decentralized markets: Evidence from automobiles," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 121(2), pages 232-235.
    12. Junjun Tang & Xing Zhao, 2023. "Does the new digital infrastructure improve total factor productivity?," Bulletin of Economic Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 75(4), pages 895-916, October.
    13. Madden, Gary G & Coble-Neal, Grant, 2002. "Internet economics and policy: An Australian perspective," MPRA Paper 10686, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    14. Franz Hackl & Michael Hölzl‐Leitner & Rudolf Winter‐Ebmer & Christine Zulehner, 2021. "Successful retailer strategies in price comparison platforms," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 42(5), pages 1284-1305, July.
    15. Duch-Brown, Néstor & Grzybowski, Lukasz & Romahn, André & Verboven, Frank, 2021. "Are online markets more integrated than traditional markets? Evidence from consumer electronics," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 131(C).
    16. Chris Forman & Anindya Ghose & Avi Goldfarb, 2006. "Geography and Electronic Commerce: Measuring Convenience, Selection, and Price," Working Papers 06-15, NET Institute, revised Sep 2006.
    17. Michael R. Baye & John Morgan, 2009. "Brand and Price Advertising in Online Markets," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 55(7), pages 1139-1151, July.
    18. Asplund, Marcus & Friberg, Richard & Wilander, Fredrik, 2007. "Demand and distance: Evidence on cross-border shopping," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(1-2), pages 141-157, February.
    19. Marion, Justin & Muehlegger, Erich, 2018. "Tax compliance and fiscal externalities: Evidence from U.S. diesel taxation," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 160(C), pages 1-13.
    20. Agrawal, David R. & Shybalkina, Iuliia, 2023. "Online shopping can redistribute local tax revenue from urban to rural America," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 219(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:99:y:2008:i:3:p:557-560. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolet .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.