Mathilde Munoz, University of Berkeley

"Tax Design, Information, and Elasticities: Evidence From the French Wealth Tax"

Abstract

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.

(Joint with Bertrand Garbinti, Jonathan Goupille, Stefanie Stantcheva and Gabriel Zucman)

Mathilde Munoz is currently a post-doctoral fellow at Berkeley Stones Center. She will be joining the faculty of UC Berkeley in July 2023 as an Assistant Professor of Economics.

Her research focuses on the redistributive implications of cross-border labor mobility and trade-in-services within and across countries.

Mathilde works on topics in public economics and international trade, with a particular interest for the distributional effects of globalization and tax competition.

Her research has been awarded the Young Economist Award from the International Institute for Public Finance in 2019, the OECD Future of work fellowship in 2020 and the Arthur Sachs prize in 2021.

Since 2020, she has been appointed by the European Commission as a national expert for international mobility and trade in services in France and Belgium, as part of the POSTING.STAT consortium.

You can read more about Mathilde Munoz here

CEBI contact: Kristoffer Balle Hvidberg