Taxing Wealth: Evidence from Switzerland

Marius Brülhart, Jonathan Gruber, Matthias Krapf and Kurt Schmidheiny

No 22376, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study the effects of wealth taxation on reported wealth. Our analysis is based on data for Switzerland, which has the highest rate of annual wealth taxation in the developed world. While the wealth tax base is defined at the federal level, tax rates vary considerably across locations and over time. We use aggregate data on wealth holdings by canton and individual-level data for the canton of Bern. Our estimated behavioral elasticities substantially exceed those of the taxable income literature. We also find that taxpayers bunch below the tax threshold, that observed responses are driven by changes in wealth holdings rather than mobility, and that financial wealth is somewhat more responsive than non-financial wealth.

JEL-codes: H21 H31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ger and nep-pbe
Note: AG PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (85)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22376.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Behavioral Responses to Wealth Taxes: Evidence from Switzerland (2019)
Working Paper: Taxing Wealth: Evidence from Switzerland (2016)
Working Paper: Taxing Wealth: Evidence from Switzerland (2016)
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:nbr:nberwo:22376

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22376

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().