Evaluation of behavioral responses to dividend scales

Our goal is to assess how different types of taxable income change according to whether dividends are taxed on the income tax schedule or taxed at a specific discharge rate. We would like to use the creation of the lump-sum withholding tax (PFL) by Article 6 of the 2008 Finance Act and its deletion in the 2013 Finance Law as quasi-experimental frameworks to identify the causal effects of these two reforms on different types of income. Our idea is to use the fact that its reforms have marginal tax consequences on capital that are different for taxpayers in the 30%, 41% and 45% brackets in order to identify behavioral responses. To do this, we will use the FELIN database (Sampled Income Tax File) from 1994 to 2015. These bases allow us to track the year-on-year changes in the different types of income reported for a large number of tax households. Having these files with a great historical depth (1994 to 2015) will allow us to not only use other reforms of the taxation of household capital income (examples, variations in the income tax scale, capping family quotient, etc.) but also to precisely model the non-fiscal determinants of the differences in the evolutions of the different types of households, with the help of pseudo-panel methods.

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