【AEW Webinar】Wealth and Property Taxation in the United States

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• 研討會日期 : 2023-03-23
• 時間 : 15:00
• 主講人 : Professor Camille Landais
• 地點 : Register and join online
• 演講者簡介 : Professor Camille Landais received his Ph.D. in Economics from the Paris School of Economics in 2009. He is currently a Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. His research interests are public finance, labour economics, applied microeconomics, and microeconometrics.
• 演講摘要 : We study the history and geography of wealth accumulation in the US, using newly collected historical property tax records since the early 1800s. The US General Property Tax was a comprehensive tax on all types of property (real, personal, and financial), making it one of the first "wealth taxes." Drawing on many historical records, we construct long-run, consistent, and high-frequency wealth series at the city, county, state, and national levels. We first document the long-term evolution of household wealth in the US since the early 1800s. The US experienced extraordinary wealth accumulation after the Civil war and until the Great Depression. Second, we show that spatial inequality in the US was large and highly persistent since the mid-1800s, in large part driven by Southern states. Before the Civil war, enslaved people were assessed as personal property of the enslavers, which is both morally abhorrent and implies wrongly counting forced labor income as capital. The regional distribution of wealth and the effects of the Civil war appear very different if enslaved people are not included in the property measure. Third, we investigate the determinants of long-term wealth growth and capital accumulation. Among others, we find that counties with a higher share of enslaved property before the Civil War or higher levels of wealth inequality experienced lower subsequent long-run growth in property. Finally, we highlight the importance of local public policies, notably spending on education and property taxes, for long-term capital accumulation. Using variation in property tax rates for more than 300 municipalities, we also find significant elasticities of the local capital stock, driven by extensive (migration) margin response and capitalization of property taxes into the value of local assets.
• AEW Working Paper : The Impact of Child Disability on Parental Labor Supply: Evidence from Taiwan
• Working paper 演講者簡介 : Professor Tzu-Ting Yang received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of British Columbia in 2015. He is currently an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica. His research interests are public economics, labor economics, and health economics.
• Working paper 演講摘要 : Using population-wide administrative data from Taiwan, this paper examines parental labor supply responses when children have disabilities. We find that child disability suppresses mothers' employment and earnings. This effect persists for at least ten years. In contrast, the father's labor supply hardly changes; unless when he is a non-major earner and in that case the mother's labor supply still suffers a greater setback. This is in stark contrast to findings based on the Nordic cases. Our analysis of the mechanism reveals that unequal gender roles is more important than relative labor income in explaining this asymmetry.