Behavioral Responses to Wealth Taxes: Evidence from Switzerland. Brülhart, M., Gruber, J., Krapf, M., & Schmidheiny, K. .
Behavioral Responses to Wealth Taxes: Evidence from Switzerland [link]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
We study how reported wealth responds to changes in wealth tax rates. Exploiting rich intra-national variation in Switzerland, the country with the highest revenue share of annual wealth taxation in the OECD, we find that a 1 percentage point drop in the wealth tax rate raises reported wealth by at least 43% after 6 years. Administrative tax records of two cantons with quasi- randomly assigned differential tax reforms suggest that 24% of the effect arise from taxpayer mobility and 20% from house price capitalization. Savings responses appear unable to explain more than a small fraction of the remainder, suggesting sizable evasion responses in this setting with no third-party reporting of financial wealth.
@unpublished{brulhartBehavioralResponsesWealth2019,
  title = {Behavioral {{Responses}} to {{Wealth Taxes}}: {{Evidence}} from {{Switzerland}}},
  author = {Brülhart, Marius and Gruber, Jonathan and Krapf, Matthias and Schmidheiny, Kurt},
  date = {2019},
  journaltitle = {CEPR Discussion Paper Series},
  series = {{{CEPR Discussion Paper Series}}},
  publisher = {{CEPR}},
  url = {https://ssrn.com/abstract=3471248},
  abstract = {We study how reported wealth responds to changes in wealth tax rates. Exploiting rich intra-national variation in Switzerland, the country with the highest revenue share of annual wealth taxation in the OECD, we find that a 1 percentage point drop in the wealth tax rate raises reported wealth by at least 43\% after 6 years. Administrative tax records of two cantons with quasi- randomly assigned differential tax reforms suggest that 24\% of the effect arise from taxpayer mobility and 20\% from house price capitalization. Savings responses appear unable to explain more than a small fraction of the remainder, suggesting sizable evasion responses in this setting with no third-party reporting of financial wealth.},
  pagetotal = {1–63},
  file = {C\:\\Users\\lukis\\AppData\\Roaming\\Zotero\\Zotero\\Profiles\\h20ej2eu.default\\zotero\\storage\\J23U7XTL\\Brülhart et al_2019_Behavioral Responses to Wealth Taxes.pdf}
}

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