Arun Advani, University of Warwick

15 November 14:00 to 15:15
Research Seminar - hybrid

I am an Associate Professor in the Economics Department at the University of Warwick. I am also a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a Visiting Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute, Research Associate of the CAGE Research Centre, Inequalities theme leader at the Warwick Brain Behaviour and Society GRP, and a member of the Department for Education Skills and Productivity Board.

I study issues of inequality, tax compliance, and tax design, with a focus on those with high incomes or wealth. I am a Commissioner at the Wealth Tax Commission. I also work on issues of environmental taxation, economic development, migration, and tax in low- and middle-income countries.

I am co-chair of the Discover Economics campaign, aiming to increase the diversity of people who study and work in economics. I'm also an Associate Editor at Fiscal Studies, and on the Editorial Board of the Economics Observatory.

Arun Advani University of Warwick

Taxation and migration by the super-rich

Arun Advani, David Burgherr, Andy Summers

Abstract

Using administrative data on the globally connected super-rich in the UK, we study the effect of a large tax reform on migration behaviour. Prior to 2017, offshore investment returns for ‘non-doms’ – individuals tax resident in the UK but with connections to other countries – were untaxed. Average offshore investment returns for these individuals exceeded £420,000; even without considering other types of income, this puts them in the top 0.2% of the population. A reform in 2017 brought long-stayers and UK-born non-doms into the standard tax system, reducing their effective net of average tax rate by between 8.8% and 13.0%. We find that migration responses were limited: our central estimate of the migration elasticity is 0.02, and across a range of specifications we can rule out elasticities larger than 0.5. Using reforms for the UK-born super-rich who were living abroad, we find that migration elasticities are limited even for recent arrivals, for whom our central estimate is 0.18. Assuming similar elasticities for all non-doms, abolition of the preferential regime would increase tax revenue collected from non-doms by £3.2bn (84%).
 

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