Katrine Marie Tofthøj Jakobsen defends her PhD thesis at the Department of Economics

Title:

"Impact of Taxation on Household Behavior: Evidence from Danish Administrative Data". if you want a copy of the thesis, please contact: Charlotte.Jespersen@econ.ku.dk

Time and place

26 March 2020 at 16:00.  If you want to attend the defense, please use this link: https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/9536476672

Evaluation committee

Professor Niels Johannesen, department of Economics, University of Copenhagen,, Denmark (chairman
Professor Sebastian Siegloch, University of Mannheim
Associate Professor David Jinkins, CBS

Abstract

This thesis consists of three self-contained research papers in public finance. They can be read independently but share two common features. First, they study how different types of taxation schemes affect and shape the economic behavior of households, and second, they utilize the rich Danish administrative data. 

Chapter 1 studies the effects of wealth taxation on wealth accumulation. Denmark used to impose one of the world’s highest marginal tax rates on household wealth, but this tax was greatly reduced in 1989 and abolished in 1996. We exploit this reduction to estimate the short and medium run effects of wealth taxes on wealth accumulation. We build and calibrate a simple life cycle model that allows us to simulate the long-run effects of wealth taxes. The chapter is co-authored with Kristian Jakobsen, Henrik Kleven, and Gabriel Zucman.

Chapter 2 revisits the estimation of the elasticity of taxable income, which is a key parameter for assessing the efficiency costs of personal income taxes. We show that the state-of-the-art estimation strategy is, in essence, a triple difference estimation. This insight makes the key identifying assumption clear, and we show how this underlying assumption can be validated econometrically and graphically. We illustrate our new approach by using tax and benefit reforms in Denmark. The chapter is co-authored with Jakob Egholt Søgaard. 

Chapter 3 studies the effect of a reduction in a tax on new car registrations on households’ choice of car and car prices in Denmark. New cars are taxed the first time they are first registered in Denmark, and this tax was reduced for medium and large cars in November 2015. I utilize this tax reduction as a natural experiment and I find that households respond by purchasing new cars with higher pre-tax values and quality levels, not by purchasing more cars. Second, the tax reduction is completely passed on to consumers such that households buying a new car reaps the full benefit of the reduction.