Gabriel Zucman

Gabriel Zucman, born in Paris in 1986, is associate professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley, and director of the EU Tax Observatory.

He is the author of articles published in peer-reviewed journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Public Economics, 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 globalization.

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. This research finds that 8% of the world’s household financial wealth is held in tax havens, with large variation across countries from a few percent in Scandinavia to 50% in Russia. Data leaked from offshore financial institutions (such as the Panama Papers) suggest that offshore wealth is highly concentrated.

A second strand of research combines theory and empirics to quantify the redistributive effects of international tax competition. The results suggest that close to 40% of multinational corporate profits are shifted to tax havens globally and more than 50% for US multinationals. This profit shifting has notable redistributive implications across countries and social groups. Granular results of this research, available at MissingProfits.world, make it possible to assess alternative forms of taxation of multinational companies, such as minimum taxes and the use of apportionment formulas.

With the members of the World Inequality Lab, he has developed prototype distributional national accounts, statistics that decompose macroeconomic growth by social group. With Emmanuel Saez, he has constructed long-run series on the distribution of US wealth and with Thomas Piketty he has studied inequality in China, Russia, and the long-run accumulation of capital in rich countries back to 1700. The results are made available on the World Inequality Database (WID.world).

Another area of research analyzes the economic effects of wealth taxation on capital accumulation, international mobility, inequality, tax avoidance, and tax evasion in countries such as France, Denmark, and the United States. These studies shed light on current debates about the desirability and practicality of taxing wealth.

The Triumph of Injustice, written with Emmanuel Saez, presents an analysis of the progressivity of the US tax system taking into account all taxes at all levels of government, since the creation of the income tax in 1913. The book, supplemented by an open-source tax reform simulator, proposes to reinvent progressive taxation around three pillars: a progressive wealth tax, a new way to tax multinational companies, and a new national income tax. It was awarded the Hans Matthöfer Prize.

Gabriel Zucman received his PhD in 2013 from the Paris School of Economics and taught at the London School of Economics before joining the Berkeley faculty in 2015.

In 2021 he was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. In 2019, he was awarded the Bernacer Prize and a Sloan Research Fellowship. He received the Excellence Award in Global Economic Affairs from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in 2017, and the Best Young French Economist Prize awarded by Le Monde and le Cercle des Economistes in 2018.

His research papers, data, programs, as well as broader-audience articles, are available online at gabriel-zucman.eu and on:

• WID.world (global inequality data)
• MissingProfits.world (international profit shifting)
• TaxJusticeNow.org (US taxes and tax policy simulator)
• TaxObservatory.eu (European taxation)

Contact

About

Other Affiliations

• Associate Professor of Economics, Department of Economics

Last updated on 07/06/2021