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Isabel Martinez
Last Name
Martinez
First name
Isabel
Email
isabel.martinez@unisg.ch
Phone
+41 71 224 3172
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1 - 10 of 15
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PublicationType: journal articleJournal: CESifo ForumVolume: 02/2018 Volume19
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PublicationType: journal articleJournal: UBS Center Public PaperVolume: No. 6
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PublicationVolatile Top Income Shares in Switzerland? Reassessing the Evolution Between 1981 and 2010In the last 20 years, the share of top incomes in Switzerland has risen, while exhibiting large variations. Switzerland is similar to European countries for the top 1% but closer to the U.S. for higher top income groups. With the synthetic control method we close a time gap in the tax data, exploiting the fact that Swiss cantons changed their tax system at different points in time. Using social security data which cover all top labor incomes, we document the growing importance of labor compared to capital incomes among top income earners in Switzerland.Type: journal articleJournal: The review of economics and statisticsVolume: 99Issue: 5DOI: 10.1162/REST_a_00644
Scopus© Citations 20 -
PublicationTracking and Taxing the Super-rich: Insights from Swiss Rich Lists( 2022-06-29)We collect, digitize, and supplement the Swiss rich list for the years 1989–2020 published in the “BILANZ” business magazine to gain new insights on the structure and dynamics of top wealth in Switzerland. Using this data allows us study the the super-rich in Switzerland in ways that were not possible in previous research based largely on tax data. In addition to presenting this valuable data source, and also discussing its limitations, we make three distinctive contributions to the literature. First, we present a number of new facts on the wealth elite in Switzerland. We show that about 60% of the super-rich are heirs—a much larger fraction than in the United States where many of the super-rich are self-made—and that five in ten super-rich residing in Switzerland are foreign-born. Second, we estimate the sensitivity of the location-decision of super-rich foreigners to a preferential tax scheme that offers wealthy foreigners to be taxed on their expenses rather than on their true income and wealth. We are the first to evaluate this policy—similar to “non-dom” taxation that exists in other countries like the UK or Italy—and show that when some of the Swiss cantons abolished this practice, they lost about 30% of their stock of super-rich taxpayers. Third, we use the wealth series compiled in our BILANZ dataset to estimate the wealth shares of the top 0.01% in Switzerland and show how they compare to earlier estimates by Föllmi and Martínez (2017) based on wealth tax data. We find that top wealth concentration is higher than previously assumed, and conclude that top wealth shares based on tax data constitute a lower bound, while the estimates based on our BILANZ data are upper bounds.Type: conference paper
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PublicationThe Wealth-Income-Ratio in Switzerland, 1900-2017( 2019-06-13)Following Piketty (2104), we estimate wealth-to-income ratios for Switzerland over the period 1900-2017. For the most recent period, we find that the national wealth-income ratio in Switzerland has been rising from 494% in 1995 to 747% in 2017. This impressive increase was caused by the strong increase of capital gains in housing wealth since 2010. In addition, we present new historic estimates of the evolution of the private wealth-income ratio between 1900 and 1995. Using new data sources, we find that earlier estimates by Brülhart et al. (2017) underestimated total private wealth prior to the year 2000. This results in a much less dramatic increase in total private wealth over the period 1980-2000, supporting earlier findings of a relatively stable evolution of wealth and income inequality in Switzerland over the past century.Type: conference paper
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PublicationIntertemporal Labor Supply Substitution? Evidence from the Swiss Income Tax Holidays( 2018)
;Saez, EmmanuelSiegenthaler, MichaelThis paper estimates the intertemporal labor supply (Frisch) elasticity of substitution exploiting an unusual tax policy change in Switzerland. In the late 1990s, Switzerland switched from an income tax system where current taxes were based on the previous two years’ income to a standard annual pay as you earn system. This transition created a two-year long, salient, and well-advertised tax holiday. This change occurred both for the federal and local income taxes. Swiss cantons switched to the new regime at different points in time during the 1997–2003 period. Exploiting this variation in timing and using population-wide administrative social security earnings data matched with census data, we identify the Frisch elasticity. We find significant but quantitatively small responses of earnings with a Frisch elasticity of .05 overall. Some groups, such as high wage income earners and especially the self-employed display larger responses with Frisch elasticities of .1 and .27. We find no effects along the extensive margin at all and almost no effects on hours of work suggesting that responses are driven primarily by tax avoidance rather than real labor supply. Therefore, our estimates constitute upper bounds for the labor supply Frisch elasticity.Type: conference paper -
PublicationType: newspaper articleJournal: Vox EUIssue: online
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PublicationType: presentation
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PublicationType: presentation
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PublicationType: presentation