THE IMPACT OF THE INDIVIDUAL MICRO ENTREPRENEURS LAW ON THE CREATION OF LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY
Individual micro-entrepreneur. Limited Liability Company. Tax planning. Panel data. Synthetic control method.
The Individual Microentrepreneur Law (MEI) was sanctioned in Brazil in order to formalize national entrepreneurial activity. This law proposed a series of incentives, from facilitation in the process of opening companies to tax benefits, but this new regime comes after a series of other much more complex, bureaucratic ones with even higher tax burden. The objective of this study is to examine whether this new kind of legal entity was used as a tax planning instrument, thus evaluating if there was any impact of such legislation regarding the opening of private limited companies. As an identification strategy, models with panel data were used and a Synthetic Control model was estimated to measure the new legislation’s effect. Preliminary results indicate that IML’s dissemination presented a negative and statistically significant effect in all panel data models as well as in the model with Synthetic Control, therefore it is plausible to assume that the new legislation reduced the opening of Private Limited companies. It was also found substantial evidence that the sociocultural differences among brazilian regions directly impact the opening of new companies. Southeast and south regions presented the highest performances among all, while northeast, midwest and north, exhibited the lowest respectively.