Youssef Benzarti
Associate Professor of Economics, UC Santa Barbara. Faculty Research Fellow, NBER. Director, Public Finance Lab.
Associate Professor of Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara. Faculty Research Fellow, National Bureau of Economic Research. Director, Public Finance Lab, UCSB.
Working papers
Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection in the Social Insurance Market for Entrepreneurs. With Jarkko Harju, Ella Mattinen, Tuomas Matikka and Alisa Tazhitdinova. July 2026. PDF
Policy Thresholds as Growth Barriers: Theory and Evidence from a Payroll Tax Notch. With Sami Jysmä and Jarkko Harju. August 2026. PDF
Can VAT Cuts and Anti-Profiteering Measures Dampen the Effects of Food Price Inflation? With Santiago Garriga and Dario Tortarolo. Revise and resubmit, American Economic Review. NBER Working Paper 32241, June 2024. PDF
Modern US Workers’ Compensation and Work-Related Injury: No Evidence of Moral Hazard. With Emiliano Huet-Vaughn. NBER Working Paper 28187, November 2020. PDF
Publications
Tax Incidence Anomalies. Annual Review of Economics, 2025. NBER Working Paper 32819. PDF · Slides
Rising Income Tax Complexity. With Luisa Wallossek. National Tax Journal, 77(1), 2024. NBER Working Paper 31944. PDF
Playing Hide and Seek: How Lenders Respond to Borrower Protection. Review of Economics and Statistics, 106(2), 2024, 384–393. NBER Working Paper 26382. PDF
Featured in CardRates.com.
Can Payroll Tax Cuts Help Firms During Recessions? With Jarkko Harju. Journal of Public Economics, 200, 2021, 104472. NBER Working Paper 27485. PDF
Using Payroll Tax Variation to Unpack the Black Box of Firm-Level Production. With Jarkko Harju. Journal of the European Economic Association, 19(5), 2021, 2737–2764. NBER Working Paper 26640. PDF
Do Value-Added Taxes Affect International Trade Flows? Evidence from 30 Years of Tax Reforms. With Alisa Tazhitdinova. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 13(4), 2021. NBER Working Paper 26195. PDF
Estimating the Costs of Filing Tax Returns and the Potential Savings from Policies Aimed at Reducing These Costs. Tax Policy and the Economy, 35, 2021. PDF
Featured in Marketplace.
What Goes Up May Not Come Down: Asymmetric Incidence of Value Added Taxes. With Dorian Carloni, Jarkko Harju and Tuomas Kosonen. Journal of Political Economy, 128(12), December 2020. NBER Working Paper 23849. PDF
Featured in Bloomberg, Microeconomic Insights. Used in policy debates in Denmark, Japan, Austria and the United Kingdom — see Policy & Press.
How Taxing Is Tax Filing? Using Revealed Preferences to Estimate Compliance Costs. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020. NBER Working Paper 23903. PDF
Featured in Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Time, Quartz, Marketplace, Le Figaro, The Blade, the Economic Report of the President, NBER Digest.
Does Mandating Social Insurance Affect Entrepreneurial Activity? With Jarkko Harju and Tuomas Matikka. American Economic Review: Insights, June 2020. NBER Working Paper 25651. PDF
Featured in AEA Research Highlights.
Who Really Benefits from Consumption Tax Cuts? Evidence from a Large VAT Reform in France. With Dorian Carloni. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 11(1), February 2019, 38–63. NBER Working Paper 23848. PDF · Appendix
Featured in Le Figaro, Les Echos, L’Express, Capital, LCI, BFM Business, Ouest-France, France 2, France 3, Libération, Alternatives Économiques, AEA Chart of the Week. See Policy & Press for the 2018 debate this fed into.