Suchergebnisse

This paper examines the effect of taxes on the individuals' choices of educational direction, and thus on the economy's skill composition. A proportional labour income tax induces too many workers with high innate ability to choose an educational type with high consumption value and low effort costs. This increases the skill mismatch and aggregate unemployment in the economy. The government can correct for this distortion by use of differentiated tuition fees or tax rates.

The dual income tax provides the self-employed entrepreneur with huge incentives to participate in tax minimizing income shifting to have more of his income taxed as capital income. The Norwegian split model is designed to remove these incentives, but it contains loopholes. The present paper concludes that the split model induces the self-employed entrepreneur to over-invest in firm real capital. In addition, the corporate organizational form serves as a tax shelter for high income entrepreneurs. The higher his income and the higher the difference between the marginal tax rates on labor and capital, the larger the incentives to incorporate.

Drawing on a unique dataset of leaked customer lists from offshore financial institutions matched to administrative wealth records in Scandinavia, we show that offshore tax evasion is highly concentrated among the rich. The skewed distribution of offshore wealth implies high rates of tax evasion at the top: we find that the 0.01 percent richest households evade about 25 percent of their taxes. By contrast, tax evasion detected in stratified random tax audits is less than 5 percent throughout the distribution. Top wealth shares increase substantially when accounting for unreported assets, highlighting the importance of factoring in tax evasion to properly measure inequality. (JEL D31, H24, H26, K34)