Publications
Publications
The Sentimental Propagation of Lottery Winnings: Evidence from the Spanish Christmas Lottery (with Evi Pappa and Morteza Ghomi)
[Paper] [Online App] Journal of Monetary Economics, Volume 143, 103-525, April 2024
Presentations and media coverage
Media coverage: English [VoxEU Column]; Spanish [Nada es Gratis] [El País] [El Español] [Agencia SINC]
Working papers
This paper shows that family firms are used as vehicles for inheritance tax avoidance among the wealthy and assesses their implications for the effective taxation of wealth. Exploiting a major tax reform in Catalonia (Spain) that widened the tax gap between favored and non-favored assets, I document a shift in inherited wealth toward business assets, especially family firm equity. This pattern is consistent with affluent testators transferring financial and non-productive assets to existing firms as capital contributions before death. Linking inheritance and wealth tax records, I estimate that this behavior reduces combined inheritance and wealth tax revenues by 16% annually, primarily through inheritance tax losses. The findings underscore that preferential tax treatment of business assets within broad wealth tax systems can result in substantial fiscal losses and undermine effective wealth taxation.
Presentations and media coverage
Presentations: CESIfo Area Conference on Public Economics (March 2024), KOF Seminar ETH Zurich (April 2024), IIPF Annual Congress (August 2024), WIEM Conference 2024 University of Chicago (September 2024), SAEe 2024 (December 2024), Universidad de Chile (April 2025), BI Oslo (May 2025), EU Tax Seminar (October 2025)*, Paris Dauphine Family Business Seminar (November 2025)*
Media coverage: Spanish [El Diario] Catalan [5centims]
The Effects of Inheritance Taxation on Wealth Mobility: Lessons from Spain [Draft]
This paper studies the impact of inheritance taxation on intragenerational wealth mobility. To do so, I exploit rich variation in tax rates across Spanish regions resulting from the decentralization of this tax to regional governments. Using household panel data from the Spanish Survey of Household Finances, I document that higher inheritance taxes significantly and persistently reduce heirs’ wealth mobility at the lower part of the net wealth distribution. These wealth mobility responses to higher taxes are explained by less wealthy heirs decreasing their financial wealth and increasing their personal credit debt. Liquidity constraints and some particularities of the tax enforcement help rationalize the rise in personal credit debt at the time of the tax payment. Illiquidity of inheritances helps explain the lasting negative effects of taxes on bottom-wealth mobility, as delays in selling inherited real estate amplify the negative effects of taxes on personal credit debt and financial wealth of less wealthy heirs.
Presentations and media coverage
Presentations: Essex PhD Conference in Applied Economics (March 2023), IEB EU Tax Observatory Workshop on The Economics of Taxation (May 2023), Lofoten International Symposium on Inequality and Taxation (June 2023), EEA-ESEM 2023 (August 2023), Madrid Public Economics Workshop (September 2023), 5th Swiss Workshop on Local Public Finance and Regional Economics (October 2023), HFCN Network Meeting (June 2024)
Media coverage: Spanish [Nada es Gratis] [El Confidencial]
Female Financial Portfolio Choices and Marital Property Regimes (with Lidia Cruces and Susana Párraga)
This paper studies the relationship between married couples’ portfolio choices and property division rules. Using rich household survey data, we exploit the regional variation in marital laws in Spain to estimate the causal effects of property division rules on household financial investment. We find that separate-property couples hold riskier financial portfolios than community-property ones when wives lead household finances. To rationalize this gap in risky assets holdings, we develop a financial portfolio choice model where couples are subject to divorce risk but differ in their property division rule and the gender of the spouse making financial decisions. A model featuring sufficiently high dissolution costs of marital assets for community-property wives can replicate the empirical estimates. High dissolution costs of marital assets upon divorce reduce the outside option for community-property spouses, encouraging precautionary savings in the form of safe assets during marriage compared to their separate-property counterparts who bear no cost. Higher partner savings transfers in divorce attenuate this mechanism, while low-income levels reinforce it.
(Selected) work in progress
The anatomy of the property tax pass-through in rental markets with Ander Iraizoz and Darío Serrano-Puente
Inter-vivos transfers and intergenerational wealth mobility with Javier Soria-Espín