In the throes of economic crisis, the Spanish government decided to reintroduce the Wealth Tax, appealing to redistributive motives and its need for greater revenues. This paper studies how individuals reacted to the reintroduction of this tax by drawing on the universe of wealth tax returns submitted to the Catalan Tax Agency between 2011 and 2015. Thus, we exploit the variation in treatment exposure to analyse taxpayers' responses, in terms not only of wealth accumulation, but also of the potential avoidance strategies adopted. Indeed, our results reflect avoidance rather than real responses. They show that while facing higher wealth taxes did not have a negative effect on taxpayers' savings, it did encourage them to change their asset and income composition to take advantage of wealth tax exemptions (mostly business-related) and the existence of a limit on wealth tax liability. This translates into an elasticity of taxable wealth with respect to the net-of-tax rate of return of 0.64, or, put differently, a 0.1 percentage point increase in the average wealth tax rate leads to a reduction in taxable wealth of 3.24% over 4 years. Overall, these avoidance responses are quite marked in terms of tax revenues: they represent a 4-year accumulated revenue loss of 2.6 times the 2011 estimated wealth tax revenues. The existence of such responses mostly related to the design of the wealth tax has relevant policy implications not only in terms of revenues but also insofar as it undermines the tax's redistributive role.

This paper offers empirical evidence from Spain of a connection between the tax administration and the political power. Firstly, the regional tax administration is not immune to the budgetary situation of regional government, and tends to exert a greater (or lesser) effort in tax collection the greater (or lower) the (expected) public deficit. At the same time, the system of unconditional grants from the central layer of government provokes an "income effect" which disincentivises the efforts of the tax administration. Secondly, these efforts also decrease when the margin to lose a parliamentary seat in an electoral district is cut, although the importance of this disincentive decreases according to the parliamentary strength of the incumbent.JEL Code: H21, H72, H77

Quality of governance is a key for political accountability, hence, the importance of identifying its determinants. Here, we focus on one dimension of quality of governance: fiscal transparency. Drawing on a sample of 691 Catalan municipalities (2001-7), we estimate the factors determining levels of budgetary transparency. Political competition and decentralization are the most important determinants of fiscal transparency. By contrast, budgetary variables do not appear to play any role.