A Wealth Tax at Work

Over the past decade, the question of whether and, in the event, how to tax household wealth has risen to the forefront of policy debates across the world. As Norway belongs to only a handful of countries that (still) levy an annual net wealth tax, we use the Norwegian example to review the case for annual taxation of wealth. Our discussion benefits from the use of rich administrative data, enabling us to provide a comprehensive set of empirical facts that are useful in assessing the merits of wealth taxation. We consider some of the central issues in the wealth tax debate: how the taxation of wealth fits in with personal income tax, distortionary effects, redistributional effects, and the extent to which wealth taxation may cause adverse liquidity effects for private firms. Taken together, we consider that the evidence presented here does not weaken the case for maintaining the tax in the Norwegian case: we find favorable distributional effects and efficiency losses appear to be limited (JEL codes: H21, H23, H25, and H31).