Rising wealth inequality is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, threatening both equal opportunity and the foundations of democratic governance. Yet calls for taxing wealth remain limited, even though such measures could help curb inequality. Recognising the central role of media...

The taxing authority of subnational governments is limited by the geographic location of individuals and economic activity. The rise of telework decouples a worker's residence from the employer's location, creating challenges for personal income taxes, corporate income taxes, and unemployment...

Since its inception, the Welsh Government has had powers over local taxation - determining the structure of council tax (with councils then setting the headline tax rate) and the structure and level of business rates. The late 2010s saw the Welsh Government gain powers over a number of other...

We compare wealth taxes and capital gains taxes in a random growth model with idiosyncratic investment risk. At equal tax revenue, wealth taxes generate higher wealth inequality but also higher wealth mobility than capital gains taxes. The mechanism operates through variance: wealth taxes shift...

The taxing authority of subnational governments is limited by the geographic location of individuals and economic activity. The rise of telework decouples a worker's residence from the employer's location, creating challenges for personal income taxes, corporate income taxes, and unemployment...

Standard optimal capital tax theory abstracts from modeling asset prices, making it unsuitable for thinking about capital gains and wealth taxation. We study optimal redistributive taxation in an environment with asset price movements, adopting the modern finance view that asset prices fluctuate...

Wealth taxes have been tried many times. In the early 1990s, about half of Western Europe still had wealth taxes. In the meantime, all but three of these countries have given up on them, including, in some cases, under left-wing governments, and even the three remaining ones have scaled back...

Many decentralized countries struggle with low levels of subnational tax effort. As a remedy for this situation, specific-purpose incentive schemes designed for own revenue mobilization at the subnational level can be simple, efficient, and cost-effective tools. We examine the effects of an...

This paper investigates the short and long-run effects of the inter-governmental redistribution of property tax on housing supply. For the short-run analysis, we leverage a property tax policy reform as an exogenous shock and use propensity score matching DID to establish the causal linkage...

The study examines the shift in taxation of open-ended fixed-income funds in Brazil from a realization basis to an accrual basis (locally known as come-cotas), which was introduced in 1998 and more recently extended to include private closed-end funds and offshore trusts through the enactment of...

This paper investigates gender disparities in residential property ownership and tax compliance in a large Argentine municipality using detailed tax administrative data. While ownership is evenly distributed between women, men, and co-owned properties up to the 40th percentile of the value...

Council tax is levied on the occupiers of residential property to help fund the provision of local services. Individual Scottish councils set the tax rates for their area, but it is the Scottish Government that determines the tax base to which the tax rates apply. With properties still assigned...

This paper develops a framework to analyze partial population experiments, a generalization of the cluster experimental design where clusters are assigned to different treatment intensities. The framework allows for heterogeneity in cluster sizes and outcome distributions. The paper studies the...

The Scottish Government has a range of tax powers at its disposal, which it has used in recent years to forge an increasingly distinct tax policy from the rest of the UK. In its 2025-26 Budget, the Scottish Government made a number of tax policy changes, including to income tax, business rates,...

Is charitable giving politically motivated? This article uses exhaustive administrative household panel data and a natural experiment to investigate the giving behavior of wealthy households and quantify their preferences for charitable and political donations. Our dataset includes all the...

This paper introduces a framework for estimating long-run series of measures of overall inequality and top wealth shares when data consist of a combination of historical tabulations and modern administrative registers of taxable wealth. The proposed framework is applicable when historical wealth...

This paper investigates preferences for wealth redistribution through a conjoint experiment. Specifically, we explore how support for wealth redistribution depends on the social background of the taxpayer and whether their wealth is perceived as resulting from luck or hard work. Our findings...

Developing countries often face a cycle where weak tax compliance limits public goods, cutting incentives to pay taxes. We test whether improved local infrastructure can disrupt this cycle, using a randomized street paving experiment in Acayucan, Mexico. Of 56 eligible street projects, 28 were...

Wealth is increasingly unequally distributed in many countries. This study examines public perceptions of wealth deservingness and preferences for taxing the wealth of the rich, focusing on how opinions vary based on the amount, use, and origin of wealth. Drawing on an original vignette...

Wealth is increasingly unequally distributed in many countries. This study examines public perceptions of wealth deservingness and preferences for taxing the wealth of the rich, focusing on how opinions vary based on the amount, use, and origin of wealth. Drawing on an original vignette...

This paper examines the fiscal and extra-fiscal effects of decentralizing the collection of Brazil's rural land tax from the federal level to local governments. Using a difference-in-differences research design, we assess the impact of local tax enforcement on revenue, land use, and...

This paper analyzes how a wealth tax affects investor portfolio choice when a realization-based capital gains tax is present. We develop a two-period model with heterogeneous investors and show that while a capital gains tax distorts portfolio choice by encouraging investors to postpone...

Recent proposals to tax unrealized capital gains or wealth have sparked a debate about their impact on entrepreneurship. We show that accrual-based taxation creates two opposing effects: successful founders face greater dilution from advance tax payments, whereas unsuccessful founders receive...