A Wealth Tax at Work

Behavioural Responses to a Wealth Tax

Thor Thoresen, Marius A K Ring, Odd E Nygård and Jon Epland

CESifo Economic Studies, 2022, vol. 68, issue 4, 321-361

Abstract: Over the past decade, the question of whether and, in the event, how to tax household wealth has risen to the forefront of policy debates across the world. As Norway belongs to only a handful of countries that (still) levy an annual net wealth tax, we use the Norwegian example to review the case for annual taxation of wealth. Our discussion benefits from the use of rich administrative data, enabling us to provide a comprehensive set of empirical facts that are useful in assessing the merits of wealth taxation. We consider some of the central issues in the wealth tax debate: how the taxation of wealth fits in with personal income tax, distortionary effects, redistributional effects, and the extent to which wealth taxation may cause adverse liquidity effects for private firms. Taken together, we consider that the evidence presented here does not weaken the case for maintaining the tax in the Norwegian case: we find favorable distributional effects and efficiency losses appear to be limited (JEL codes: H21, H23, H25, and H31).

Keywords: wealth tax; administrative data; distributional effects; efficiency loss (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cesifo/ifac009 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: A wealth tax at work (2021)
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:oup:cesifo:v:68:y:2022:i:4:p:321-361.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

CESifo Economic Studies is currently edited by Panu Poutvaara

More articles in CESifo Economic Studies from CESifo Group Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().