The IEB researcher, Mariona Mas, will be one of the beneficiaries of one of the 15 grants of the ‘Ayudas a la Investigación 2017‘ that the Fundació Banc Sabadell offers this year. Thanks to the grant, Mas will be able to expand his research ‘Identifying and Estimating Behavioral Responses to Wealth Taxation’, in which she analyzes how the catalan taxpayers has reacted to the reapplication of wealth taxes since 2011 and how users made a profit of the exemptions.
The project aims to shed light on an almost unstudied issue. The preliminary results suggest that taxpayers with higher tax rates adopted avoidance strategies which mainly consist on moving assets from taxable to non-taxable wealth, which would impair the redistributive function of the tax.
The grant from the Fundació Banc Sabadell includes an budget of 6,000 euros and offers the possibility to carry out research in foreign universities.