Current work

• REVISED "Follow the money! Why dividends overreact to flat-tax reforms", with Laurent Bach, Arthur Guillouzouic, Claire Leroy and Clément Malgouyres. [working paper PSE, HAL]

We estimate behavioral responses to dividend taxation using recent French reforms: a rate hike and, five years later, a cut. Exploiting tax data at household and firm-level as well as data linking firms and shareholders, we find very large dividend tax elasticities to both reforms. Individuals who control firms adjust dividend receipts instantaneously, accounting for most of the aggregate dividend reaction. Investment is insensitive to dividend taxation. Dividend adjustments are instead driven by corporate saving, as owner-managers treat firms as low-tax saving vehicles. Corporate profits decline following dividend tax increases, suggesting firms also serve as tax-free consumption vehicles. Our results fit the 'new view' of dividend taxation, provided an additional low-tax yet costly payout option is available that offers a tax arbitrage opportunity to entrepreneurs in control of their firms.


• REVISED "Does Tax-Benefit Linkage Matter for the Incidence of Payroll Taxes?", with Thomas Breda, Julien Grenet and Arthur Guillouzouic.

We study the earnings responses to six large payroll tax and income tax reforms in France. We find evidence of full pass-through to workers in cases where there is a strong and clear relationship between contributions and expected benefits. By contrast, we find a limited pass-through of employer payroll taxes to workers for reforms with no tax-benefit linkage, and close to full pass-through to workers for income tax reforms nominally incident on employees. Together with a meta-analysis of the literature, we interpret these results as evidence that tax-benefit linkage matters for incidence of payroll taxes, a claim long made by the literature but not backed by empirical evidence to date. Absent tax-benefit linkage, our results suggest that the individual-level incidence of payroll taxes aligns with their statutory incidence.


• NEW "Escape or Play Again? How Retiring Entrepreneurs Respond to the Wealth Tax", with Laurent Bach, Arthur Guillouzouic, and Clément Malgouyres.

Using an exhaustive panel of French income and wealth taxpayers, we find that entrepreneurs pay far more wealth taxes once they retire. Despite this, entrepreneurs do not leave France more often than high-wage employees upon retirement. Rather, retired entrepreneurs reinvest part of the proceeds from the sale of their business into tax-favored angel investments.


• DRAFT SOON "Do Billionaires Pay Taxes?", with Laurent Bach, Arthur Guillouzouic an Clément Malgouyres.

This paper estimates the top of the income and wealth distribution in France and provides new measures of the tax rates faced by high income and wealthy households due the wealth tax. We assemble new data that links people to the businesses they own which allows us to reconstruct precisely the value of business assets at the top and the income derived from them (whether or not they appear on household oncome tax returns). We show that business assets and the associated income are very concentrated. We find that the French wealth tax was associated with effective tax rates much lower than the nominal rates. This discrepency is driven by two features of the design of the wealth tax: the exemption of business assets from the tax base and the ceiling mechanism which was based on taxable income.