Spencer Bastani

Acceptance of Wealth and Capital Taxation

Spencer Bastani is interested in the determinants of the support for wealth and capital taxation in the population. In one paper, he used data from a large-scale randomised field experiment to study how attitudes to capital taxation and the support for inheritance taxation depends on knowledge about the wealth distribution.

Mr Bastani’s research is mainly concentrated in the area of Public Economics, with a focus on tax policy. His work is both theoretically and empirically oriented. Recent theory projects include the analysis of optimal tax policy in the presence of asymmetric information between workers and firms, the design of child care subsidies in the presence of variable child care quality and the role of parental leave regulations as an instrument to correct under-provision of workplace flexibility. Recent empirical projects include the analysis of effects of reforms in the tax/transfer-system on the labour force participation of married women in Sweden and the effects of employment protection on retirement behaviour. Mr Bastani is also an active participant in the policy-sphere and regularly engages in applied tax policy discussions.

Spencer Bastani is an associate professor at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Before joining Linnaeus University, he was an assistant professor at Uppsala University where he also obtained his PhD. He is affiliated with the Linnaeus University Center for Discrimination and Integration Studies, the Uppsala Center for Fiscal Studies and the Uppsala Center for Labor Studies as well as the CESifo Research Network.