Not logged in.

Contribution Details

Type Working Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Taxing our wealth
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Florian Scheuer
  • Joel Slemrod
Language
  • English
Institution National Bureau of Economic Research
Series Name Working Paper Series
Number 28150
Number of Pages 35
Date 2020
Abstract Text This paper evaluates proposals for an annual wealth tax. While a dozen OECD countries levied wealth taxes in the recent past, now only three retain them, with only Switzerland raising a comparable fraction of revenue as recent proposals for a US wealth tax. Studies of these taxes sometimes, but not always, find a substantial behavioral response, including of saving, portfolio change, avoidance, and evasion, and the impact depends crucially on design features, especially the broadness of the base and enforcement provisions. Because the US proposals are very different from any previous wealth tax, experience in other countries offers only broad lessons, but we can gain insights from closely related taxes, such as the property and the estate tax, and from optimal tax analysis of the role of wealth taxation.
Free access at DOI
Digital Object Identifier 10.3386/w28150
Other Identification Number merlin-id:20429
PDF File Download from ZORA
Export BibTeX
EP3 XML (ZORA)