Using administrative wealth records from Denmark, we study the effects of wealth taxes on wealth accumulation. Denmark used to impose one of the world's highest marginal tax rates on wealth, but this tax was drastically reduced and ultimately abolished between 1989 and 1997. Due to the specific...

The paper analyzes the fiscal effects of a Swiss-type tax on household wealth, with a $120,000 exemption and marginal tax rates running from 0.05 to 0.3 percent on $2,400,000 or more of wealth. It also considers a wealth tax proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren with a $50,000,000 exemption, a...

We study the effects of wealth taxation on reported wealth. Our analysis is based on data for Switzerland, which has the highest rate of annual wealth taxation in the developed world. While the wealth tax base is defined at the federal level, tax rates vary considerably across locations and over...

The article identifies the key assumptions that underlie competing theories of the incidence of the local property tax. We conclude that the"benefit view" which maintains that the property tax system is equivalent to a set of non-distortionary user changes is correct only under very restrictive...

Recently, attention has focused on the estate tax. To date, however, the debate over estate taxes has been nearly devoid of standard considerations of deadweight loss. We develop a framework for computing the deadweight loss of a revenue-neutral switch from an estate tax to a capital income tax,...

Proposition 13, adopted by California voters in 1978, mandates a property tax rate of one percent, requires that properties be assessed at market value at the time of sale, and allows assessments to rise by no more than 2% per year until the next sale. In this paper, we examine how Prop 13 has...

We provide estimates of the impact and long-run elasticities of tax base with respect to tax rates for four large U.S. cities: Houston (property taxation), Minneapolis (property taxation), New York City (property, general sales, and income taxation), and Philadelphia (property, gross receipts,...

This paper develops a realistic, tractable theoretical model that can be used to investigate socially-optimal capital taxation. We present a dynamic model of savings and bequests with heterogeneous random tastes for bequests to children and for wealth per se. We derive formulas for optimal tax...

In 2008, the IRS initiated efforts to curb the use of offshore accounts to evade taxes. This paper uses administrative microdata to examine the impact of the enforcement efforts on taxpayers' reporting of offshore accounts and income. Enforcement caused approximately 60,000 individuals to...

Marginal excess burden, defined as the change in deadweight loss for an additional dollar of tax revenue, has been measured for labor taxes, output taxes, and capital taxes generally. This paper points out that there is no we1 1-defined way to raise capital taxes in general, because the taxation...