 Overreaction to capital taxation in saving decisionsJournal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 2022, vol. 144, issue C Abstract: This paper studies the response of saving decisions to two alternative types of capital taxation: the wealth tax and the capital income tax. First, we conducted a lifecycle experiment using Amazon MTurk, wherein subjects made dynamic saving decisions. Subjects exhibited an overreaction to wealth taxes but not to capital income taxes: subjects’ savings decreased more with the introduction of a wealth tax than with a financially equivalent drop in capital returns. Second, we built a parsimonious behavioral model of individual optimization to characterize this overreaction and illustrate its welfare implications. Finally, additional treatments began to explore the root cause of this overreaction bias. We ruled out the explanation that the intrinsic aversion to paying wealth taxes drives overreaction. Instead, overreaction seems to be driven by subjects’ incorrect understanding of the effects of wealth taxes on their savings. Keywords: Capital income tax; Wealth tax; Tax overreaction; Behavioral and experimental economics (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:dyncon:v:144:y:2022:i:c:s0165188922002457 DOI: 10.1016/j.jedc.2022.104541 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control is currently edited by J. Bullard, C. Chiarella, H. Dawid, C. H. Hommes, P. Klein and C. Otrok More articles in Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control from Elsevier |
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