Camille Landais
London School of Economics
Houghton Street
London, WC2A 2AE
+44(0)20-7955-7864
c.landais@lse.ac.uk
-
Professor of Economics, London School of Economics
-
Director, CEPR Public Economics Program
-
Co-Editor, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
NEW:
-
«
Wealth and Property Taxation in the United States
»
with Sacha Dray & Stefanie Stantcheva
[Slides]
[Abstract]
Abstract: We study the history and geography of wealth accumulation in the US, using newly collected historical property tax records since the early 1800s. The property tax in the US was a comprehensive tax on all kinds of properties (real estate, personal property, financial wealth, etc), making it one of the first ``wealth taxes.’’ Our new data allows us to reconstruct wealth series at the city, county, and state levels over time and to study the effects of property taxes on property values, migration, and investment. We first document the long-term evolution of household wealth in the US since the early 1800s, offering the first fine-grained and high-frequency estimates of household wealth over more than 200 years. The US had significantly lower wealth than Europe and only caught up with Europe after WW1, despite GDP per capita having been larger than that of France or the UK since the late 1870s. Second, we study the spatial allocation of wealth in the US over the long run. We show that the geography of wealth is extremely persistent: per capita wealth by county in the 1850s is still highly predictive of income per capita today. Factors related to geography and demographics correlate strongly with wealth at the city, county, and state levels. Finally, we leverage our data and policy variations to better understand the determinants of wealth accumulation, in particular the role of property taxation. Our data features large variation in property tax rates across more than 300 municipalities and we can study the changes in wealth and other outcomes following episodes of large, sudden, and persistent increases or decreases in effective property tax rates, in a Generalized Synthetic Control Design (Xu [2017]). We find an implied elasticity of capital income with respect to the net-of-tax rate on income of about .70 after 10 years. This implied elasticity can be broken down into an (extensive) elasticity of the population of about .26 and an intensive elasticity of per capita income of about .44. The intensive margin elasticity appears to be driven in part by reporting and avoidance responses, but also by significant capitalization of property taxes in local real estate prices.
-
«
Retirement Consumption & Pension Design
»
with Jonas Kolsrud, Daniel Reck & Johannes Spinnewijn
[Slides]
[Abstract]
Abstract: This paper develops and implements a framework that leverages consumption data to evaluate the welfare effects of pension reforms. Several countries have reformed their pension profiles to incentivize later retirement. Using administrative data in Sweden, we find that such pension reforms entail substantial consumption smoothing costs. On average, individuals retiring later have higher consumption levels than those retiring earlier, implying that recent pension reforms redistributed from low- to high-consumption households. We show that the differences in retirement consumption are mostly driven by differential changes in consumption around retirement, and also that the marginal propensities to consume are the lowest for late retirees. Accounting for selection on health and life expectancy further increases the redistributive cost of recent reforms. The cost of incentivizing later retirement is, however, lowest between the early and normal retirement age, where we document a striking non-monotonicity in consumption levels. We find similar patterns in consumption data from other countries, including the non-monotonicity, suggesting our findings are not unique to Sweden.
-
«
Should We Insure Workers or Jobs During Recession?
»
Prepared for the Journal of Economic Perspectives, with Giulia Giupponi, & Alice Lapeyre
[Abstract]
Abstract: What is the most efficient way to respond to recessions in the labor market?
To this question, policymakers on both sides of the pond gave two diametrically
opposed answers during the recent crisis. In the US, the focus was on insuring
workers, by aggressively increasing the generosity of unemployment insurance
(UI). In Europe, to the contrary, policies were concentrated on saving job matches,
with the massive use of labor hoarding subsidies through short-time-work (STW)
programs, on which so little is actually known. In this article, we try to understand
who got it right. Building on the vast literature on UI and on a recent stream of
papers on STW, we first provide a framework to determine the relative welfare
effects of STW versus UI. We then show that UI offers more insurance value than
STW, but tends to exhibit larger fiscal externalities, due to moral hazard. We finally
focus on how STW and UI affect labor market equilibrium and how this interacts
with inefficiencies in the labor market. We review recent evidence showing that
STW can be an effective way to reduce socially costly layoffs in recessions. Overall,
we conclude that STW is an important and useful addition to the labor market
policy-toolkit during recessions, with strong and positive complementarities with
UI.
JOB OPPORTUNITIES:
-
PRE-DOCTORAL FULL-TIME RESEARCH ASSISTANTS, London School of Economics
[Details]
The Public Finance Group of the Economics Dept at the LSE hires every year two or more full-time pre-doctoral research assistants for the academic year.
Applicants should be completing (or have completed) a Bachelor's or Masters degree and have strong quantitative and programming skills. This position is suitable for people looking to obtain experience in economic research for 1 to 2 years before applying to graduate school in economics.
If you are interested, you can send an inquiry email to c.landais@lse.ac.uk. All applications must be submitted
[here]> The next round of applications is live. Please send your applications before Wednesday 8th April 2020 (23.59 UK time)