Does electronic invoicing lead to stronger tax compliance? Evidence from China

This article investigates whether China’s fully digitalized electronic invoicing reform has improved tax compliance, using a staggered difference-in-differences approach. The results show that: (1) The e-invoicing reform has significantly improved firms’ effective tax rate by 0.91 percentage points on average. This finding remains robust after controlling for firm-level and regional confounders and across a range of robustness checks, including alternative measures of tax compliance and alternative clustering of standard errors. (2) Mechanism analyses indicate that the reform reshapes firms’ reporting behavior on both the revenue and cost sides of the production process. Firms adjust reported revenues and reported costs jointly, with a stronger contraction in reported costs than in reported revenues, leading to an overall reduction in tax evasion. (3) Heterogeneity analyses reveal that the compliance-enhancing effect of the reform is more pronounced among non-state-owned enterprises, firms operating outside key industries under intense tax authority scrutiny, and those located in regions with lower tax enforcement capacity. This study provides micro-level evidence on the effectiveness of digital tax reforms and offers practical implications for tax governance policy.