Owen Zidar
@omzidar
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Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Dad of 2.
Princeton, NJ
Joined October 2008
The Case for a Retro Tax Code | Chicago Booth Review covers some of my work with Eric Zwick
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A 400-person Southern town braces for an influx of 6,000 auto workers as a giant Ford plant rises.
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The discussions of unrealized capital gains for the very rich (ie those with wealth exceeding $100M) are often missing a key fact - two thirds of unrealized gains at the very top is from gains in private businesses. (From SCF data @jasonfurman @MargRev
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Average household wealth in the US now exceeds one million dollars based on the latest 2022 data in the SCF (. The median household has 193K in wealth
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Evidence from the birthday of the owner and the owner’s spouse
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The revenue potential of capital gains taxes is larger than what many expect
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When people discuss capital gains, they often evoke esoteric theories and think about simple assets like selling stock. They should really have ordinary private businesses in mind (like beverage distributors and car dealers) when thinking about these proposals at the top.
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It’s not possible to raise enough from tariffs to replace the income tax . “Tariffs are levied on imported goods, which totaled $3.1 trillion in 2023. The income tax is levied on incomes, which exceed $20 trillion”
How high does the tariff need to be to fully replace the income tax?
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Re NBERWP 30396 we have written a lot of replies and assembled a lot of evidence on top wealth in America. Paper: Appendix: Reply to SZ21: Reply to SZ20: .
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For every public company CEO, there are more than 1,000 private business owners with at least $25 million in wealth.
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My student @CabezonFran has a very interesting job market paper that investigates how the presence of a large informal sector affects optimal pension design
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We want to clarify two things about our working paper on the investment and tax revenue effects of the 2017 tax reform ( .@gchodorowreich.
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2023 Job Market Candidates - Princeton University - Department of Economics
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@gchodorowreich , Eric Zwick, and I have a new paper for the journal of economic perspectives out today. We assess the business provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the biggest corporate tax.cut in US history. We draw 5 lessons. .
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One implication of a lot of activity at the top coming in the form of private business is that the gradual weakening of the estate tax (ie raising the threshold, lower enforcement, etc) + step up at death has resulted in a lot of unrealized gains in family firms run by heirs.
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The share of transactions that stock sales represent has fallen substantially. It's not about someone's apple stock. We should be thinking about the decisions of private business owners when analyzing how behavior might respond to these policy changes
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There's a lot of wealth south of Richmond. Notes: we used state wealth estimates from our top wealth paper to estimate the share of wealth above and below the latitude of Richmond. We used county population to apportion the wealth of states that are split
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Our paper assessing the business provisions of the tax cuts and jobs act is out today in the journal of economic perspectives .
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Congrats @EDerenoncourt!.
We have today announced the names of the 2024 Sloan Research Fellows! Congratulations to these 126 outstanding early-career researchers:.
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Raise corporate tax rates! No, cut them! Maybe take a look first?— Harvard Gazette
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Time to restore the estate tax at the very least. “The Greatest Wealth Transfer in History Is Here, With Familiar (Rich) Winners” - The New York Times
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Job Post: Come work with us at the Industrial Relations Section for AY 2025-26! @econ_ra . We (@leah_boustan @EDerenoncourt @simon_jaeger @PaulineCarry @zbleemer David Lee and I) are hiring 5 new research specialists to join @PrincetonEcon . Apply here:
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@mattyglesias @kearney_melissa Great interview. I very much liked and agree with this point that @kearney_melissa made about the allocation of government spending: “The federal government spends a pittance on kids compared to the elderly. We spend six times more on the elderly per capita than kids”.
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How inheritance data secretly explains U.S. inequality - The Washington Post
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Firms that got larger tax changes increased their investment by more than those that got smaller tax changes
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Or the Wirtz family, which became famous for owning the NHL's Chicago Blackhawks but got rich running a $2.5 billion wine and liquor distributor.
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Am excited to be back in Berkeley tomorrow for Mar 18, Seminar 231, Public Finance: “Tax Policy and Investment in a Global Economy”
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We also examine the effects of different provisions of the reform and find that expensing has a higher bang-for-the-buck than the statutory corporate tax rate decrease
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Was looking at the line item totals for corporate tax returns ( . #TaxTwitter It seems crazy to me that there is 4.77T of mystery meat "other deductions" on line 26. This mystery meat exceeds salary and wages by ~1T! What are the big "other deductions"?
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1. While we appreciate recent coverage of our working paper in this WSJ op-ed ( and this @TaxFoundation summary (, we want to clarify that we find that the 2017 reform had substantial negative effects on corporate tax revenue.
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@Brad_Setser's testimony on Pharma Manufacturers and International Tax Policy is worth reading!.
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Taxing the rich (more) | Oxford Review of Economic Policy | Oxford Academic
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How much money do doctors really make and why is it such a lot? - The Washington Post
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1. Party like it's 1997: Reverting to the tax code of January 1997 would raise trillions in tax revenue and increase progressivity via modest increases in dividend taxes, estate taxes, capital gains, and top individual incomes
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For (b), Figure 9 shows that there are approx zero dynamic growth effects on tax revenue due to two opposing forces: the positive effects from higher capital accumulation and labor compensation are offset by the negative effects of higher investment expensing costs.
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Pricey Child Care Is Keeping Many Parents Out of the Workforce - WSJ
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Today’s wsj editorial seems confused. If the goal is to have a pro-growth corporate tax system, why does it oppose a refundable r and d tax credit? It would be more generous to have refundability and benefit some younger innovative firms that are not yet profitable
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The real reason the highest-paid doctors are in the Dakotas - The Washington Post
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Am exited to see what this great team at @The_Budget_Lab puts together - congratulations and best of luck with the launch!.
So excited to announce that @natasharsarin and @dannyyagan and I are launching @the_budget_lab at Yale Law School. Budget scoring is an incredibly important part of the policy process and our hope is to bring a new perspective, with a focus on innovation and transparency. 1/.
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The updated version of Figure 1 from our "Party like it's 1997" tax plan is striking. Reverting back to the tax code of 1997 would help bring us closer to running surpluses again.Party like its 1997: Data: OMB Historical Table 1.2 (
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Here’s some of the best evidence I’ve seen about how the rising price of health insurance is hollowing out the middle class. Please consider interviewing Jess on the Econ job market.
Jessica Min's (@jessicamin_) job market paper examines how rising employer-sponsored health insurance costs impact US labor markets.
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At the household level in terms of net worth in the SCF in 2022, the top 10%, 1%, 0.1%, and 0.01% shares of wealth are 73.4%, 35.1%, 14.7%, and 5.5%, respectively. The 2022 household net worth thresholds to be in those groups are 1.9M, 13.6M, 62M, and 264M, respectively.
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Was on @planetmoney today talking about the tcja and gave some grades on its effects on investment, tax revenue, and wages
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“You can look at evidence of what happened from the first round of tariffs from the initial Trump administration, and it’s pretty clear that prices went up,” Owen Zidar, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton, told us.
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"Despite a large increase in the share of lower-income students in the overall college-going population, the representation of these students at elite private or public colleges has remained at similarly low levels throughout the last century"
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@econ_ra My colleagues Henrik Kleven, @ikuziemko, and @esoltas are hiring pre-docs for the Public Finance Program @PrincetonEcon. Apply here:.
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Is there data on the universe of boat owners in the U.S.? I'm mainly interested in the geographic distribution but would also find boat cost or value to be useful. Perhaps there is info based on new boat licenses or taxes? I found this from a quick search
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A modest tax reform proposal to roll back federal tax policy to 1997 - Equitable Growth via @equitablegrowth.
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We estimate parameters from this reduced-form response and to quantify the long-run effects on capital accumulation and tax revenue. Model-implied capital increases by 7%.
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SOI Tax Stats - Joint Statistical Research Program | Internal Revenue Service - call for proposals
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The TJCA of 2017 was the largest corporate tax reduction in the history of the United States. It lowered the top statutory corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, changed a host of investment incentives, and fundamentally altered the treatment of international income.
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US manufacturing commitments double after Biden subsidies launched | Financial Times
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2. The paper is still a work-in-progress. We are refining it based on helpful feedback that we received at the NBER from @jasonfurman ( and other folks. Additional feedback is most welcome!.
Taxes actually do matter (Part I). Companies that saw larger reductions in tax rates from the TCJA also experienced larger increases in investment in the years that followed. From a cool new paper by @gchodorowreich @omzidar Eric Zwick & Matthew Smith.
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