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

My latest research

Who Paid the 75% Tax on Millionaires? Optimization of Salary Incomes and Incidence in France
Latest working paper, slides

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.

Inequality and Redistribution in France, 1990-2018: Evidence from Post-Tax Distributional National Accounts, with Antoine Bozio, Bertrand Garbinti, Malka Guillot, and Thomas Piketty, WID.world WORKING PAPER SERIES N° 2018/10

This paper presents post-tax Distributional National Accounts (DINA) for France. That is, we combine national accounts, tax and survey data in a comprehensive and consistent manner to build homogenous annual series on the post-tax, post-transfer distribution of national income by percentiles over the 1990-2018 period, with detailed breakdown by age, tax and transfer categories. We come with three main findings. First, taxes and transfers reduce total income inequality by 23% on average in France over this period. This is significant, but less than in the US (34%). The reason why overall inequality is much smaller in France than in the US is entirely due to differences in pretax inequality rather than in secondary redistribution. Next, due to the large role of indirect taxes, social contributions, and income capital exemptions, the overall profile of taxation is structurally regressive in France, a feature that has been reinforced in 2017-2018. Third, monetary transfers benefit mostly older age groups in France, and leave unaffected the low relative position of younger age groups. These series are currently being extended to cover the entire 1900-2018 period and to better take into account in-kind transfers.

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.

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