A wealth tax at work

Arbeitspapier

Over the past decade, the question of whether and how to tax household wealth has risen to the forefront of policy debates across the world. Norway belongs to only a handful of countries that (still) levy an annual net wealth tax. We exploit rich Norwegian administrative data to perform descriptive analyses that address questions at the focal point of the wealth tax debate. We discuss how the taxation of wealth fits in with the personal income tax. We further investigate the redistributional effects of wealth taxation and explore the extent to which wealth taxation may cause adverse liquidity effects for private firms. Finally, we consider the effects of wealth taxation on charitable giving. Taken together, we see the evidence presented here as not weakening the case for upholding the tax: we find favorable distributional effects and the efficiency losses appear to be limited.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Discussion Papers ; No. 960

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Taxation and Subsidies: Efficiency; Optimal Taxation ; Taxation and Subsidies: Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and Subsidies ; Business Taxes and Subsidies including sales and value-added (VAT) ; Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents: Household
• Subject: Wealth tax ; administrative data ; distributional effects ; efficiency loss

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Thoresen, Thor Olav ; Ring, Marius A. K. ; Nygård, Odd E. ; Epland, Jon
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Statistics Norway, Research Department
• (where): Oslo
• (when): 2021

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/250127
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET