Gabriel Zucman wins Clark medal for young economists – 05/02/2023 – Market

French economist Gabriel Zucman, 36, an expert on inequality and tax policy, is the winner of the 2023 John Bates Clark Prize.

The John Bates Clark Medal is an award given annually to “the economist under age 40 who has made a significant contribution to economic knowledge” by the American Economic Association. Until 2009, the award was given every two years.

An associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Zucman is the co-author of “The Triumph of Injustice”, in which he discusses how the rich pay little tax and what must be done to get them taxed more.

He also wrote “The Hidden Wealth of Nations” (The Hidden Wealth of Nations). The economist also developed several works on the subject with economist Thomas Piketty.

In the statement, the association says that Zucman has made fundamental contributions to the field of economics and that he is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on tax evasion, having contributed to the literature on measuring and explaining the increase in economic inequality.

“His research provides important clues that fuel political debates about the design of tax systems around the world”, says the text.

The entity also points out that Zucman’s work has led economic research to understand that this phenomenon is more important than previously thought.

The association points out that in the work “The Missing Profits of Nations”, published in the Review of Economics Studies, Zucman estimated the volume of transfer of international profits by multinational companies.

“Zucman and co-authors estimate that 36% of the profits of multinationals worldwide are transferred to tax havens”, says the statement.

“Thank you, American Economic Association, for this incredible honor. I am immensely grateful to the many co-authors, mentors, colleagues and students from whom I learned so much and who made all this research possible”, wrote the researcher on his Twitter account.

Before the French award, the entity already awarded other young researchers who would gain prominence in the following years, such as Robert Solow (1961), Lawrence Robert Klein (1959), Joseph Stiglitz (1979) and Paul Krugman (1991).

“Zucman is one of the most important economists at the moment studying wealth inequalities and the design of taxation systems capable of dealing with these inequalities”, evaluates Brazilian researcher Guilherme Lichand, from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, who is also an expert on the subject.

“What makes his work even more interesting and important is the fact that it is linked to an international policy issue, the taxation of wealth. A subject that has been the subject of several recent discussions in the United States and also in Brazil.”

In an article published in Valor Econômico newspaper, Lichand also pointed out that Zucman —in partnership with economist Emmanuel Saez in the article “Wealth Taxation: Lessons from History and Recent Developments”— concludes that the most important reasons for the low taxation of wealth in European countries are political, not economic.

In addition to the historically low tax exemption threshold on wealth, there is a lack of an income-like system to cross-reference bank data and property records to define taxable wealth, explains Lichand. In addition, governments tax by place of residence, which increases fears that the richest will move to other countries.