NBER Publications by Camille Landais

This paper analyzes the effects of income taxation on the international migration and earnings of top earners using a Danish preferential foreigner tax scheme and population-wide Danish administrative data. This scheme, introduced in 1991, allows new immigrants with high earnings to be taxed at a preferential flat rate for a duration of three years. We obtain three main results. First, the scheme has doubled the number of highly paid foreigners in Denmark relative to slightly less paid ineligible foreigners, which translates into a very large elasticity of migration with respect to the net-of-tax rate on foreigners, between 1.5 and 2. Hence, preferential tax schemes for highly paid foreign workers could create severe tax competition between countries. Second, we find compelling evidence of...

This paper analyzes the effects of top earnings tax rates on the international migration of football players in Europe. We construct a panel dataset of top earnings tax rates, football player careers, and club performances in the first leagues of 14 Western European countries since 1985. We identify the effects of top earnings tax rates on migration using a number of tax and institutional changes: (a) the 1995 Bosman ruling which liberalized the European football market, (b) top tax rate reforms within countries, and (c) special tax schemes offering preferential tax rates to immigrant football players. We start by presenting reduced-form graphical evidence showing large and compelling migration responses to country-specific tax reforms and labor market regulation. We then develop a multino...

This paper analyzes optimal unemployment insurance (UI) over the business cycle. We obtain an optimal UI formula that resolves the trade-off between insurance and job-search incentives in a broad class of models in which the job-finding rate depends on UI. Our formula generalizes the standard Baily-Chetty formula, only valid when the job-finding rate is a constant. The formula relates the optimal replacement rate of UI to the usual sufficient statistics (risk aversion, consumption-smoothing benefits of UI, and microelasticity of unemployment with respect to UI) and a new sufficient statistic (macroelasticity of unemployment with respect to UI). While the microelasticity accounts only for the response of job search to UI, the macroelasticity also accounts for the response of the job-finding...