A wealth tax at work

Abstract

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.