Program

Clara Martinez-Toledano (Imperial College Business School)

Taxation and Behavioral Responses

This lecture will be divided into two blocks. First, I will review recent research studying behavioral responses to wealth taxation and its implications for mobility and inequality. Second, I will review recent research studying behavioral responses to capital gains taxation and its implications for financial markets and inequality.

David Seim (Stockholm University)

Inequality, Institutions, and Evasion

This short course introduces key topics in contemporary public and labor economics, focusing on the determinants of wealth inequality, employment protection legislation (EPL), and tax evasion. We begin by examining how inheritances, saving behavior, and heterogeneity in rates of return shape the distribution of wealth, and how event-study and other quasi-experimental methods can be used to distinguish mechanical effects from behavioral responses. We then turn to EPL and study how firing costs, seniority rules, and notice requirements affect job separations, hiring, and productivity, drawing on theoretical insights and recent empirical evidence using sharp institutional variation. The final part of the course covers the measurement of tax evasion—both individual and corporate—including the role of random audits, third-party reporting, and how hidden or misreported income can be allocated when firms are used as tax shields. Throughout, we emphasize research design, interpretation, and clear exposition, and conclude with practical guidance on developing research ideas and writing strong empirical papers.

Arthur Guillouzouic (CNRS, AMSE)

Income and Tax Design

Tax systems are designed to be progressive, but the interaction between personal and business income taxation has recently been shown to trigger some regressivity at the very top, spurring some policy proposals to increase billionaires' taxes. This lecture will explore why traditional income-based taxation struggles to capture the true economic capacity of high-net-worth individuals and entrepreneurs, focusing on the mechanisms that allow them to report low taxable income despite substantial underlying wealth. Participants will study how retained earnings in closely held firms, holding companies, flexible dividend policies, and the strategic realization of capital gains enable affluent business owners to decouple their living standards and investment power from the income that appears on tax returns, potentially altering effective tax burdens at the top. This lecture will draw primarily on the French institutional and administrative setting and will examine the granular data required to understand retained earnings, business ownership structures, and the taxes associated with them. The program will address key empirical challenges—such as firm–owner matching, valuation methods—, and econometric issues--in particular reversion to the mean--that researchers must tackle to rigorously analyze these questions.

Ségal Le Guern Herry (Aix-Marseille Université, AMSE)

Evasion and Migration Responses to Taxation

The capacity of governments to implement progressive tax systems depends crucially on how high-income and high-wealth individuals respond to taxation. This session examines two central response channels: tax evasion and international mobility. We review core theories and recent empirical evidence on how individuals adjust their evasion behavior or location choices in response to taxes and discuss recent developments in the global tax-enforcement environment. The session highlights the implications of these behaviors for revenue, equity, and tax design, and outlines open research questions in modern public economics.

Alain Trannoy (EHESS, AMSE)

Land taxation: Principles and Implementation

Since the origins of economics, land taxation has been understood as nearly first-best because land supply is fixed and does not deteriorate, at least for urban land. Standard modern public economics has generally taken the point for granted without further investigation and has basically forgotten it. The aim of the lecture is to review the literature on making the point and examine the conditions under which the intuition is valid in dynamic models of the economy. In the second step, we examine implementation difficulties that could undermine the theoretical result.