Roberto Iacono

Municipal Wealth Tax Reform in Norway

In his most recent paper, which he also plans to present at CESifo, Roberto Iacono and his collaborators analyze behavioral responses to wealth taxation, estimating the causal effects of a unique municipal wealth tax reform in Norway. The researchers exploit variation from the single-period municipal reform reducing the marginal tax rate on wealth exclusively in the northern Norwegian municipality of Bø from 0.85% to 0.35%, since 2021. Mimicking the behavior of a tax haven, Bø represents the first municipality in Norway to reduce the municipal wealth tax rate since 1943. The researchers document a 66.6% increase in taxable wealth in response to a 1 percentage point drop in the tax rate. The elasticity of taxable wealth increases to 71.6% when focusing exclusively on wealth taxpayers. They also estimate a significant but more modest 10.3% jump in the weighted mass of wealth taxpayers in the treated municipality. Internal mobility appears as the major behavioral response, accounting for a large portion of the post-treatment total net wealth in the treated municipality.

Mr. Iacono’s recent research is at the intersection between Public and Labor Economics, with a focus on 1) the measurement of income and wealth inequality, and 2) microeconometric questions related to active labor market policy and welfare interventions. While at CESifo, he  is interested in meeting with researchers in the areas of public economics. He will be available for discussing research and potential collaboration using Norwegian administrative data to which he has access.

Roberto Iacono is an Associate Professor in Economics and Social Policy at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is also an Associate Professor (II) in Economics at the Business School of the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN). Mr. Iacono is Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE International Inequalities Institute (LSE III), Managing Editor of the Journal of Income Distribution (JID), and Fellow of the World Inequality Database (WID.World). He is also a project participant of the RCN-funded project “Make Taxation Fair” (FRIPRO, NOK 11.8 million, 2021-2026). Mr. Iacono holds a PhD in Economics from the Department of Economics at NTNU (graduation year 2015).