Wealth Taxation: The Key to Unlocking Capital Gains

Abstract

We study how wealth taxes affect portfolio choice in the presence of a realization-based tax on capital gains. We develop a two-period model with heterogeneous investors. Capital gains taxations distort portfolio choice by providing an incentive to postpone realization.We show that a wealth tax levied alongside the capital gains tax can eliminate this distortion for all investors. We develop an optimal-tax model that trades of equity gains from the capital-gains and wealth tax to efficiency losses related to intertemporal and portfolio choice, and derive an elasticity-based empirical criterion for the desirability of a wealth tax.