Behavioral Responses to Wealth Taxes: Evidence from Switzerland

Marius Brülhart, Jonathan Gruber, Matthias Krapf and Kurt Schmidheiny

No 7908, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

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.

Keywords: wealth taxation; behavioral responses; taxpayer mobility; evasion; Switzerland (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H24 H31 H73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-iue, nep-ltv and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp7908.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Behavioral Responses to Wealth Taxes: Evidence from Switzerland (2022)
Working Paper: Behavioral Responses to Wealth Taxes: Evidence from Switzerland (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_7908

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().