Armenian data sources and their role in shaping public policy, by Zareh Asatryan, ZEW
Hosted by Central Bank of Armenia, 10AM-noon, Friday, June 23, 2017
This workshop explores different types and sources of micro and macro data that are instrumental for evidence based public policy design, and presents several examples of such research from Armenia. Sources of data include firm-level administrative tax-returns, matched household and individual-level surveys, scraped registrar data on firm ownership aggregated to town-level, as well as historical country-level datasets. The usefulness of several other data sources, the value of merging these datasets, and the important role of utilizing natural experiments in these applications are discussed.
Such data is then used to evaluate the effectiveness of public policy in Armenia, particularly focusing on fiscal and tax policy. Issues and questions of interest include:
i) the effectiveness of traditional-type government interventions, such as sectoral tax subsidies or size and place-based tax exemptions on firm performance and entrepreneurship,
ii) the role of behavioral properties of public policy, such as the potential effects of nudges, framing and information on small-business tax compliance or on individual savings rates,
iii) the institutional setup of fiscal governance with the goal of achieving sustainable public finances.
Location: Central Bank of Armenia, 6 Vazgen Sargsyan St., Yerevan
Duration: 10AM-noon
About the instructor: Zareh Asatryan is researcher at ZEW’s Research Department “Corporate Taxation and Public Finance”. He
completed his doctorate in Economics from the University of Freiburg, Germany. For additional details, see http://www.zew.de/en/team/ZAS/
AEA thanks CBA for hosting the workshop and Dr. Asatryan for donating his time.