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 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 (IPP)

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

• Joana Naritomi (LSE)

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

• Dzhamilya Nigmatulin (HEC Lausanne)

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

• David Henning (Oxford)

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

• TBC

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

• Jeanne Bomare (LSE)

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

This project has received funding from the European Union (TAXUD/2022/DE/310).