EU Tax Observatory Lunch Seminar 2025-26

The increased global mobility of capital and labour poses a number of challenges to national tax systems: intricate global structures to hide personal wealth from the eyes of tax administrators and regulators, conflicts about the international allocation of taxing rights, a fast-evolving international tax policy landscape. The seminar focuses on the topic of taxation in the global economy and aims to bring together international junior and senior researchers working on international taxation, tax avoidance and evasion, tax competition, tax harmonization and related topics. Presentations can be polished papers or work in progress. The aim is to learn from each other and to discuss in a friendly atmosphere.

The seminar takes place at Paris School of Economics and via Zoom.

Sign-up for the seminar mailing list here.

If you would like to book a private time slot to meet the speaker, please email Rémi Lei remi.lei@psemail.eu or Léo Czajka leo.czajka@psemail.eu specifying which session.

2025-26 Calendar

Friday 20 March 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-14

• David Henning (University of Oxford): Tax Audits and Their Distortionary Effects

Abstract: Tax audits are intended to raise revenue, but in low-capacity settings they may also distort firm behavior and shrink the formal sector. Leveraging detailed administrative tax data from the Ugandan Revenue Authority (URA), a novel linked survey, and a regression discontinuity design (RDD), we show that comprehensive audits can backfire. While comprehensive audits generate tax corrections on impact, they reduce subsequent tax filing and, on net, lower tax liabilities. Audited firms are more likely to shut down, and those that remain operational reduce their sales. We interpret these findings through a dynamic model in which audits impose immediate payment and enforcement costs on credit-constrained firms. The results suggest that tax enforcement affects not only compliance, but also firm survival, production, and growth in low-capacity settings.

Friday 3 April 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-14

• Jeanne Bomare (LSE): “Death and Taxes: Inheritance Tax Planning and Unexpected Mortality”

Abstract: We use the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment to identify the scale and mechanisms of inheritance tax planning in the United Kingdom. By providing an exogenous shock to mortality, the pandemic suddenly truncated the time available for anticipatory planning. Linking administrative inheritance tax returns to high-frequency mortality data, we compare estates of individuals who died unexpectedly during the pandemic with those of observationally similar decedents from pre-pandemic years. We find that unexpected deaths are associated with significantly larger reported estates – increasing the average estate by approximately £350,000 – and a 5 percentage point rise in effective tax rates. Our results indicate that inheritance tax planning reduces effective liabilities by at least 55 percent, representing an annual revenue loss of £3-4.5 billion. We show that inter-vivos transfers, rather than within-estate portfolio restructuring, are the primary planning margin. These findings demonstrate that the ‘seven-year rule’ for gifts is a first-order determinant of the effective tax base and suggest that revenue-raising reforms must prioritize the treatment of lifetime transfers.

Friday 10 April 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-14

• Camille Semelet (LMU Munich)

Friday 24 April 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-14

• Adnan Khan (LSE)

Friday 22 May 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-14

• Nathan Lane (LSE)

Friday 5 June 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-14

• TBC

Past Seminars

Friday September 19 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-15

• Margarita López Forero (SERMI-DPEM, Banque de France): Offshoring Wage Inequality in Tax Havens with Kevin Parra-Ramirez and Gabriel Smagghue

Friday 26 September 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-15

• Laurence Jacquet (CY Cergy Paris Université): Production Regulation Principles and Tax Reforms

Friday 3 October 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-15

• Usama Jamal (CY Cergy Paris University): Tax Rules and Capital Reallocation: Real Effects of Anti-Tax Avoidance Policies

Friday 10 October 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-09

• Isabel Micó Millán (Bank of Spain): Inheritance Tax Avoidance Through the Family Firm

Friday 17 October 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-15

• Rocco Macchiavello (London School of Economics): Mafias and Firms

Friday 24 October 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-15

• Enea Baselgia (ETH Zurich): Inequality and Redistribution in Switzerland: Evidence from Distributional National Accounts

Friday 7 November 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-15

• Enrico Rubolino (University of Lausanne, CREST): How Teaching Tax Morale in Schools Shapes Prosocial Behavior

Friday 21 November 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-14

• Jakob Brounstein (Institute for Fiscal Studies): Discouraging firm ownership via tax havens in Ecuador

Friday 28 November 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-15

• Joana Garcia (Banco de Portugal): Inheritance Tax Avoidance Through the Family Firm

Friday 6 February 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-14

• Guillermo Cruces (CEDLAS and University of Nottingham): From Flat to Fair? The Effects of a Progressive Tax Reform

Paper abstract: We study the effects of a progressive tax reform on tax compliance, using a research design that distinguishes between two channels. First, using a quasi-experimental design, we estimate the direct effects of the reform—namely, how changes in a household’s own tax rate affect its own compliance. Second, leveraging a large-scale natural field experiment, we estimate the indirect effects: holding a household’s own tax rate constant, we examine how its compliance is influenced by changes in the tax rates of other, poorer or richer, households. We find substantial direct effects: lowering taxes for poor households increases their compliance, while raising taxes for rich households reduces theirs. We also find sizable indirect effects: when poor households learn about the tax hikes on the rich, their stated perceptions of tax fairness and their actual compliance both increase. Among rich households, learning about tax cuts for the poor also improves perceived fairness, but, if anything, reduces compliance. Using an additional reform and follow-up field experiment conducted a year later, we replicate both the quasi-experimental and experimental results. Together, our findings show that tax compliance responds not only to a household’s own tax burden but also to its perception of fairness of the broader tax system. Our results also underscore the potential disconnect between stated and revealed preferences for redistribution. Finally, we present a counterfactual analysis that illustrates the implications of the direct and indirect effects for designing progressive tax reforms.

Friday 13 February 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-14

• Étienne Fize (Institut des Politiques Publiques): Keep It in the Family, or Else! How Tax-Friendly Shareholder Agreements Affect Firm Outcomes

Paper abstract: France offers a large relief from inheritance and gift taxation for business transfers, conditional on signing a shareholder agreement that locks in ownership and management for several years. Using administrative data on transfers of controlling blocks matched to corporate records, we study how business transfers executed under a tax-friendly shareholder agreement differ from other transfers around the date of the transfer. We find that shareholder agreements are associated with greater short-run stability of control and fewer restructurings of the transferred legal unit, but we detect only very limited differences in firms’ “real” decisions (investment, profitability) and no effects on employees’ long-run employment outcomes.

Friday 27 February 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-14

• Joana Naritomi (LSE): Does Progressivity Raise Tax Capacity? Experimental Evidence from the D.R. Congo

Abstract: Progressive taxation is a defining feature of high-income countries’ tax systems, but developing countries typically rely on less progressive instruments. We study the introduction of progressive property taxation in a large Congolese city through a citywide field experiment conducted  in partnership with the provincial government. Neighborhoods were randomly assigned to either a progressive or a proportional schedule with equal revenue potential. The progressive system increased total revenue by 55% relative to the proportional one. Revenue gains occurred across the property value distribution: at the top, higher statutory rates mechanically outweighed modest compliance losses, while at the bottom, lower rates induced large compliance gains that more than offset the mechanical loss. Cross-randomized information treatments show that taxpayers’ responses were driven by their own rates rather than by others’ rates or by the perceived fairness of the overall system. Finally, we examine how statutory progressivity maps into effective tax rates (ETRs). Across all systems, ETRs decline with property value — implying that the rich pay less as a share of wealth — and the slope is steepest under the progressive schedule. However, welfare gains are nuanced and an enforcement intervention targeting higher-value properties flattens the ETR relationship, suggesting that investments in enforcement capacity can help align effective with statutory progressivity.

Friday 13 March 2025 12:00-13:00 │ R1-14

• Dzhamilya Nigmatulina (HEC Lausanne): Smart Sanctions

Abstract: This study examines the full causal chain of the impact of the major tool of geoeconomic pressure – targeted or ’smart’ sanctions – on Russian firms in 2014-2021. Using a natural experiment with staggered sanctions roll-out and data from over 2,000,000 firms, it investigates the effects on both targeted entities and the aggregate economy. The study finds contrasting results when focusing on international trade and firms’ outcomes: although smart sanctions reduced total imports of targeted firms by 44%, sanctioned firms experienced a surprising 12% increase in revenue and a 32% increase in capital. The puzzle is resolved by a concurrent increase in government compensation through subsidies, contracts, and loans. While helping the targeted firms, these measures negatively affected the broader economy by worsening misallocation, leading to a drop of up to 0.39% in aggregate TFP. This study highlights that states reallocate the costs of geoeconomic pressure away from targeted firms and onto the general population, and thus may not internalize the full economy-wide costs of such pressure.

This project is funded by the European Union.