Bertrand Garbinti

Séminaires généraux
amse seminar

Bertrand Garbinti

CREST - Institut Polytechnique Paris
Tax design, information, and elasticities: Evidence from the French wealth tax
Co-écrit avec
Jonathan GOUPILLE-LEBRET, Mathilde MUNOZ, Stefanie STANTCHEVA, Gabriel ZUCMAN
Lieu

IBD Amphi

Îlot Bernard du Bois - Amphithéâtre

AMU - AMSE
5-9 boulevard Maurice Bourdet
13001 Marseille

Date(s)
Lundi 5 décembre 2022| 11:30 - 12:45
Contact(s)

Ewen Gallic : ewen.gallic[at]univ-amu.fr
Avner Seror : avner.seror[at]univ-amu.fr

Résumé

We study a reform of the French wealth tax that dramatically reduced the amount of information that taxpayers must self-report below a certain level of wealth. Combining administrative micro-data with dynamic bunching and difference-in-differences  approaches, we find large behavioral responses to this switch to a low-information regime. The reform caused a 0.5 percentage points average decrease in the annual growth rate of wealth reported by treated taxpayers each year following the switch to the low-information regime. This reduction is driven by a 4 percentage points decrease for taxpayers bunching at the information discontinuity threshold. Consistent with opacity leading to lower compliance, treated households do not experience a real change in their (third-party) reported labor and capital income. The wealth tax base becomes much more elastic in the low-information regime, illustrating the first-order role of information policy choices for tax base elasticities.