In this paper, we document the role of the trusts in British real estate investment. We analyze

the direct and indirect market both for domestic and foreign trusts. Building on detailed property

level ownership and price data, we establish international ownership chains using Orbis

ownership data to detect structures. We focus on trusts either as the nominal owner of properties or as upstream owners of other nominal owners. The main mode of investment in British real estate is transparent with short ownership chains that links to a natural person. When ownership chains become complicated, however, they become very complicated and more likely to include trusts. We document a high share of indirect investments through foreign trusts in more complicated chains. We provide a number of novel descriptive results on both direct and indirect trust ownership characterizing their investment into very high price properties and a geographic focus on urban agglomerations.

We examine the political costs of taxation in early modern France. We focus on efforts to enforce the salt tax, the rate of which varied across regions. Using a spatial difference-in-discontinuities design, we compare municipalities just inside the high-tax region with those just outside, before and after a reform aimed at curbing illicit salt smuggling. We find that tax enforcement led to a twenty-fold increase in conflicts between taxpayers and the state in municipalities in the high-tax region. This effect persists until the French Revolution, supporting the view that enforcing the salt tax incurred significant political costs. Finally, we document that the likelihood of conflict increases with tax differences between neighboring regions, which we use to derive an upper bound on the political costs of increased tax enforcement in this historical period.

This study examines income distribution among Japanese high-income earners using micro tax data provided by the National Tax Agency, a first for Japan. Our analysis reveals several key findings. While wage income is the primary source of income for most high-income earners, stock capital gains are the dominant source for the top income earners. The Pareto coefficient for total income in Japan is approximately 1.45 for 2020, significantly lower than the previous estimates. Unlike existing studies that exclude capital gains, our lower estimate indicates a greater concentration of income among Japan’s superrich. Additionally, effective average tax rates rise with income up to around 100 million yen, after which they decline. This regressivity is due to the Japanese income tax system, which imposes lower taxes on capital income. Using this result, we also derive the optimal marginal tax rates in Japan and find some support for raising the top marginal tax rates.

Excessive financial secrecy facilitates illicit financial flows, including via anonymous ownership of cross-border financial assets. We study the reaction of such investment to recent increases in financial transparency using a new dataset of financial secrecy for 2011---2019. We find that investors reacted by relocating their assets to jurisdictions that remain, or have recently become, relatively more financially secretive than other countries. These effects are highly non-linear and stronger for assets originating from lower-income countries. Our results suggest that recent advances in information exchange are toothless if not accompanied by improved information collection and full corporate beneficial ownership transparency.