Calendrier du 03 janvier 2023
Applied Economics Lunch Seminar
Du 03/01/2023 de 12:30 à 13:30
Salle R2.21, Campus Jourdan
GOUPILLE-LEBRET Jonathan (ENS LYON)
Tax Design, Information, and Elasticities: Evidence From the French Wealth Tax
écrit avec Bertrand GARBINTI (CREST), Mathilde MUNOZ (UC Berkeley), Stefanie STANTCHEVA (Harvard University), and Gabriel ZUCMAN (UC Berkeley)
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.