RESEARCH PAPERS

[1] Wealth Taxation and Household Saving: Evidence from Assessment Discontinuities in Norway

       Neither theory nor existing empirical evidence support the notion that wealth taxation reduces saving. Theoretically, the effect is ambiguous due to opposing income and substitution effects, and empirically, the effect may be confounded by misreporting responses. Using geographic discontinuities in the Norwegian annual net-wealth tax and third-party reported data on savings, I find that wealth taxation causes households to save more. Each additional NOK of wealth tax increases annual net financial saving by 3.76, implying that households increase saving enough to offset both current and future wealth taxes. The increase in financial saving is primarily financed by extensive-margin labor supply responses. These responses are the combination of small negative effects of increasing the marginal tax rates on wealth and larger positive effects of increasing average rates. These findings imply that income effects may dominate substitution effects in household responses to rate-of-return shocks, which has important implications for both optimal taxation and macroeconomic modeling.

[2] Entrepreneurial Wealth and Employment: Tracing Out the Effects of a Stock Market Crash

        I provide evidence that adverse shocks to the wealth of business owners during the Financial Crisis had large effects on their firms' financing, employment, and investment. I use individual-level portfolio data from Norway to exploit the dispersion in stock returns during 2008–09 as a source of exogenous variation in entrepreneurs' wealth. I then trace out the effects of these shocks to the entrepreneurs' privately-held firms. I find that the adverse employment and investment effects are primarily driven by young firms who—relative to mature firms—obtain considerably less bank financing following an owner wealth shock. Firms adjust employment primarily through hiring less, rather than firing, consistent with firms providing extensive-margin insurance for existing workers. These findings provide a causal link between asset price shocks and the real economy; and document that equity-financing frictions and the procyclicality of entrepreneurial wealth are important channels through which economic shocks amplify. 

[3] Optimal Delayed Taxation in the Presence of Financial Frictions

    In the presence of financial frictions, the timing of cash flows matters. We apply this insight to optimal income taxation by proposing a new policy: delayed taxation. Introducing a delay between the accrual and payment of income taxes provides two sources of welfare gains when some agents are borrowing constrained. First, it improves consumption smoothing by allowing constrained agents to borrow at a lower rate. Second, it reduces the present-value tax rate from the perspective of constrained agents, thereby reducing the distortionary effects of income taxation. We characterize marginally delayed taxation in a dynamic optimal tax model. We decompose the welfare gains and contrast them with those obtained by implementing age-dependent taxation or offering low-interest government loans.  We then characterize optimal delayed taxation in a simple calibrated model, which reveals substantial welfare gains from delayed taxation. When limiting the amount the government can borrow to finance tax reforms, delayed taxation significantly outperforms age-dependent taxation and government lending.  Finally, we empirically test the hypothesis that delayed taxation reduces income tax distortions in the context of young workers in Norway, where a kinked income-contingent debt conversion scheme replicates delayed taxation. Bunching analyses reveal elasticities that are considerably lower than those we find for a regular income tax threshold. Consistent with our theory, proxies for financial constraints are associated with lower sensitivities to the de-facto delayed tax, but not to the regular tax. Taken together, our results underscore the potential for delayed taxation to be a powerful new component of optimal tax policy.

[4] Wealth Taxation and Charitable Giving

        We use third-party reported data and two quasi-experiments from Norway to study how tax incentives affect charitable giving. First, using a shock to wealth tax exposure, we estimate the semi-elasticity of giving with respect to the after-tax return on wealth. Inconsistent with the notion that households accelerate giving to reduce future taxes, we find that a 1% wealth tax reduces giving by 26%. Second, using bunching at an income-tax deduction threshold, we estimate a moderate own-price elasticity of giving of -0.44. This elasticity exhibits little heterogeneity with respect to income and wealth but is considerably larger for religious giving.

[5] How much and how fast do investors respond to equity premium changes? Evidence from wealth taxation

       We use a wealth tax reform that differentially affected the after-tax returns on risky and safe assets to study how households respond to persistent changes to the equity premium. We find that households respond slowly. It takes five years for households to reoptimize as prescribed by canonical portfolio models. Our quasi-experimental findings can be rationalized by a coefficient of relative risk aversion between 2 and 3 in combination with adjustment frictions, moderate one-time entry and small per-period participation costs. Our results provide supportive evidence for the asset pricing literature that builds on portfolio-adjustment frictions to explain asset pricing puzzles, and they have implications for optimal taxation when tax rates can differ across asset classes..

[6] A wealth tax at work [published version]

        We provide descriptive evidence from Norway to address key questions surrounding the current wealth tax debate. In particular, focusing on a subset of ordinary entrepreneurs (who fully own only one firm), we find a likely limited role for the annual 1% net wealth tax in inducing liquidity constraints through including private equity in the tax base. While the wealth tax accrues above a fairly low threshold (about $150,000), the annual marginal wealth tax bill  from entrepreneurial assets accounts for less than 1% of sales for 95% of entrepreneurs.

 [7] Capital Requirements and Entry into Entrepreneurship

        We exploit a reduction in the minimum capital required to incorporate a limited liability company in Norway to study selection into entrepreneurship. We find that lowering the regulatory capital requirement from \$17,000 to \$5,000 roughly doubles the number of incorporations, indicating a large presence of potential entrepreneurs sensitive to policy-induced reductions in financial constraints. We further examine whether the large increase in entry into entrepreneurship is subject to a quantity-quality tradeoff wherein new entrepreneurs are different. By contrasting the characteristics of pre- and post-reform entrants, we find no evidence that new entrants differ in terms of age, prior income, or educational attainment. We further find no evidence that post-reform entrants had lower liquidity. Considering firm-level outcomes, we find that post-reform entrants have considerably less assets and lower revenues but are similar in terms of survival, profitability, growth rates, and proxies for productivity.  Hence, while the reform doubled the quantity of new entrepreneurs, it did not lower their quality. Interpreted through the lens of a simple theoretical framework, these results suggest that the reform primarily facilitated the entry of optimally-small firms as opposed to previously liquidity-constrained or lower-ability entrepreneurs. 

WORK IN PROGRESS

 [8] Insuring labor income shocks: The role of the dynasty

        We study the extent to which parents provide income insurance to their adult offspring. We decompose income changes into transitory and persistent shocks, and document that parents dissave (transfer) in response to transitory shocks and save (to provide transfers in the future) in response to persistent shocks.

 [9] Tax Regressivity in Scandinavia

OTHER IMPORTANT PROJECTS