Over the last 10 years, governments have launched major initiatives to reduce international tax evasion. Yet despite the importance of these developments, little is known about the effects of these new policies. Is global tax evasion falling or rising? Are new issues emerging, and if so, what are they? This lecture will address these questions based on the findings of the Global Tax Evasion Report 2024, an unprecedented international research collaboration building on the work of more than 100 researchers globally.
About the speaker:
Gabriel Zucman is a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and Ecole normale supérieure – PSL, associate professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and founding director of the EU Tax Observatory. He is the author of articles published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, and of two books. His research focuses on the accumulation, distribution, and taxation of global wealth and has renewed the analysis of the macroeconomic and distributional implications of globalisation. In a series of papers and in his book The Hidden Wealth of Nations, he has developed methods to measure the wealth held in tax havens.
A second strand of research combines theory and empirics to quantify the redistributive effects of international tax competition. Another area of research analyzes the economic effects of wealth taxation on capital accumulation, international mobility, inequality, tax avoidance, and tax evasion in France, Denmark, other European countries, and the United States. These studies shed light on current debates about the desirability and practicality of taxing wealth.
He received the John Bates Clark medal of the American Economic Association in 2023. In 2021 he was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. He was awarded the Bernacer Prize and a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2019, the Best Young French Economist Prize awarded by Le Monde and le Cercle des Economistes in 2018, and the Excellence Award in Global Economic Affairs from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in 2017.