Wealth Inequality: The Role of Inheritance and Taxation of Wealth: Postdoctoral scholarship funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research DFF - 1329-00046

Description

This project aims to shed light on two questions: (i) how important is inheritance in shaping the distribution of wealth or lifetime resources of future generations? and (ii) how responsive are taxpayers to wealth taxation intended to redistribute wealth? Economic theory points to distributional effects and policy driven behavioral responses as key in evaluating the need for and effectiveness of redistributional policy. In order to analyze the posed questions, I will exploit the unique Danish administrative wealth records and the possibility to link all family members. In the first project I will use wealth data of parents and their children to measure and fully characterize the inheritance flows when parents die and the effect on the distribution of children’s wealth. In the second project, using a new econometric method, I intend to exploit the tendency of taxpayers to report taxable wealth just below the threshold at which wealth taxation sets in so as to elicit taxpayers’ responsiveness to wealth taxation.

Period	1 Oct 2013 → 30 Jun 2016