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Postdoctoral research fellow a the Center for Law and Economics, ETH Zürich
Affiliated researcher at Institut des politiques publiques and World Inequality Lab I received my Ph.D. in June 2018 at the Paris School of Economics under the supervision of Pr. Thomas Piketty and Pr. Antoine Bozio. Research interest: Labour Economics, Public Finance, Natural Language Processing, Political Economy Contact information: IFW E 44 Haldeneggsteig 4 8092 Zürich Switzerland malka.guillot[at]gess.ethz.ch Curriculum vitae |
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My latest research
Who Paid the 75% Tax on Millionaires? Optimization of Salary Incomes and Incidence in France
Latest working paper, slides
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Using several administrative datasets, I study the impact of temporary tax on top wage income earners, implemented for 2013 and 2014 only and known as the "75% tax above 1m euro''. The tax is nominally paid by the firms. The tax base is gross annual salary income above one million euros and the top marginal tax rate on wage earners increased from 64% to 74% because of the tax. About 400 employers paid the tax each year and about 1000 employees were concerned. I document that the tax was largely borne by employers, who paid 80% of the tax. Taking advantage of the short term nature of the tax, I show that the tax triggered important optimization response of wage earners, taking the form of time-shifting. I do not see any income-shifting nor any migration response. I study the elasticity of the pre-tax labour income to the net-of-tax rate (1 minus the marginal tax rate) and find an elasticity of $0.3$, that I interpret as pure optimization. The firms were also affected by the tax through a decrease in the total number of employees and demonstrate some evidence of optimization behaviour.
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Predistribution vs. Redistribution: Evidence from France and the U.S., 2020, CEPR WP, with Bozio Antoine, Bertrand Garbinti, Goupille-Lebret Jonathan and Piketty Thomas
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How much redistribution policies can account for long-run changes in inequality? To answer this question, we quantify the extent of redistribution over time by the percentage reduction from pretax to post-tax inequalities, and decompose the changes in post-tax inequalities into different redistributive policies and changes in pretax inequalities. To estimate these redistributive statistics, we construct homogenous annual series of post-tax national income for France over the 1900-2018 period, and compare them with those recently constructed for the U.S. We obtain three major findings. First, redistribution has increased in both countries over the period, earlier in the U.S., later in France, to reach similar levels today. Second, the substantial long-run decline in posttax inequality in France over the 1900-2018 period is due mostly to the fall in pretax inequality (accounting for three quarters of the total decline), and to a lesser extent to the direct redistributive role of taxes, transfers and other public spending (about one quarter). Third, the reason why overall inequality is much smaller in France than in the U.S. is entirely due to differences in pretax inequality. These findings suggest that policy discussions on inequality should, in the future, pay more attention to policies affecting pretax inequality and should not focus exclusively on “redistribution”.
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Old 2018 WP |
The Contribution of Payroll Taxation to Wage Inequality in France
With Antoine Bozio and Thomas Breda
Latest working paper
Over the 1967–2015 period, net wage inequality has decreased in France by 25%, in contrast to the significant increase experienced by most developed countries. Less well known is the fact that labor cost inequality has actually increased by 8% over the same period. We show that, (a) standard demand-side explanations for the rise in inequality apply in France when tested using measures of labor cost (as they should be); (b) reforms to payroll taxation, jointly with increases in the minimum wage, can explain a large part of the decrease in net wage inequality, in the context of increasing market inequality.
Over the 1967–2015 period, net wage inequality has decreased in France by 25%, in contrast to the significant increase experienced by most developed countries. Less well known is the fact that labor cost inequality has actually increased by 8% over the same period. We show that, (a) standard demand-side explanations for the rise in inequality apply in France when tested using measures of labor cost (as they should be); (b) reforms to payroll taxation, jointly with increases in the minimum wage, can explain a large part of the decrease in net wage inequality, in the context of increasing market inequality.
