A Quantitative Assessment of the Net Wealth Tax: The Spanish Experience

There is growing debate, both social and academic, about the possibility of levying an annual net wealth tax. Until a few years ago, such a proposal appeared difficult to both implement and control, but recent technological innovations, which could greatly facilitate the periodic valuation of wealth, combined with improvements in international tax information sharing could make a “modern wealth tax” possible. Nonetheless, a number of challenges regarding its design still need to be addressed. Taking advantage of the Spanish experience—the only EU country to levy a wealth tax—we undertake a quantitative analysis of various key legal elements of the current tax (exemptions and the common income and wealth tax ceiling) by means of a tax simulator we have developed; we also analyze its redistributive power. Our results show that the family business exemption and the common ceilings are highly regressive. We also assess the effectiveness of alternative reforms with more comprehensive tax bases (JEL codes: H24, H23, and D31).

Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison

I explore the association between the severity of lockdown policies in the first half of 2020 and mortality rates. Using two indices from the Blavatnik Centre’s COVID-19 policy measures and comparing weekly mortality rates from 24 European countries in the first halves of 2017–2020, addressing policy endogeneity in two different ways, and taking timing into account, I find no clear association between lockdown policies and mortality development.

Furor over the Fed: A President’s Tweets and Central Bank Independence

We illustrate how financial market data are informative about the interactions between monetary and fiscal policy. Federal funds futures are private contracts that reflect investor’s expectations about future monetary policy decisions. By relating price movements of these contracts with President Trump’s tweets on monetary policy, we explore how financial market participants have perceived attempts by the President to influence monetary policy decisions. Our results indicate that market participants expected the Federal Reserve Bank to adjust monetary policy in the direction suggested by President Trump. (JEL codes: E44, E52, and E58)