Gábor Lovics, Katalin Szőke, Csaba G. Tóth and Bálint Ván (Ministry of Finance)
In order to reduce the shadow economy, in 2014 the Hungarian government introduced mandatory online cash registers (OCR) in retail, and accommodation and food services sectors (AFS). In this paper we use micro data to estimate the effect of OCR introduction on reported turnover. We identify a remarkable effect of OCR introduction in both sectors. For small enterprises, reported turnover increased by 23 percent and 35.1 percent in the retail and AFS sector, respectively. We also find significant but smaller effects for medium-sized enterprises in both sectors. For large companies, we only observe a significant impact in the AFS sector.