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Behavioral Responses to Wealth Taxes: Evidence from Switzerland
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Brülhart et al. (2019) find large taxable wealth responses to variation in wealth taxation across Swiss cantons, and argue these are not driven by geographic mobility of people.
“Using variation in wealth taxation across Swiss cantons, Brülhart et al. (2019) also find large taxable wealth responses. They argue that these responses are not driven by the geographic mobility of people across cantons.”
From Taxation and Migration: Evidence and Policy Implications (2020) · cites this paper as Brülhart et al. (2019)
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Research works printed but not linked: 26
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Cited by
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Taxation and Migration: Evidence and Policy Implications
Kleven, H., Landais, C., Muñoz, M., & Stantcheva, S. (2020) · Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/jep.34.2.119 · Cited by 226
Metadata
- Authors
- Brulhart, M., Gruber, J., Krapf, M., & Schmidheiny, K.
- Affiliations
- University of Basel (CH)
- Venue
- American Economic Journal Economic Policy
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2019
- Volume
- 14
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 111-150
- ISSN
- 1945-7731 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2981115335
- Cited by
- 81
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2025: 8 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 28 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 11 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 2
- FWCI
- 11.67
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Locations
- American Economic Journal Economic Policy (publishedVersion)
- SSRN Electronic Journal (acceptedVersion)
- edoc (University of Basel) (acceptedVersion, other-oa)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- IRIS (submittedVersion)
- Econstor (Econstor) (submittedVersion)
- SERVAL (Université de Lausanne) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- edoc (University of Basel)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (147668, 192546, 166618)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Economic and Fiscal Studies
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Taxation and Compliance Studies
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Accounting › Corporate Taxation and Avoidance
- Keywords
- wealth tax, housing prices, tax evasion, Switzerland
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