A call to Mæland and Thorburn
Petter Bjerksund and Guttorm Schjelderup: Jøril Mæland and Karin Thorburn have the burden of proof and must substantiate their claims.
Guttorm Schjelderup is a Professor of both Economics and Business Economics at the Norwegian School of Economics. Schjelderup received his PhD at NHH in 1991. He has been a visiting fellow at Cambridge University and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Schjelderup is a Research Fellow at CESIFO and the Oxford Center of Business Taxation, and he is the Head of the Norwegian Center for Taxation (NoCeT). He has been heading several governments appointed committees advising on policy.
His research interests include business taxation, multinational firm behavior, profit shifting, tax havens as well as policy evaluation. He has published in leading academic journals such as the The Economic Journal, Journal of International Economics, International Economic Review and Journal of Public Economics.
Department of Business and Management Science, NHH
Main: Business Taxation
Secondary: Managerial Economics and Business Strategy
Petter Bjerksund and Guttorm Schjelderup: Jøril Mæland and Karin Thorburn have the burden of proof and must substantiate their claims.
Petter Bjerksund and Guttorm Schjelderup: Thore Johnsen and Terje Lensberg's arguments about wealth tax were refuted in 2016, proven to be logically inconsistent. There was never a response, so the line has been drawn and the error admitted. Now they are using them again.
Petter Bjerksund and Guttorm Schjelderup: Wealth tax reduces investors' income, but at the same time it reduces investors' required return. The two effects offset each other, and Norwegian and foreign investors place the same value on the project.
The article "Playing easy or playing hard to get: When and how to attract FDI" has been published in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
Petter Bjerksund and Guttorm Schjelderup: The corporate tax rate must be raised to 28 percent if it is to finance the abolition of the entire wealth tax, and to over 30 percent if the combined corporate and dividend tax is to be kept at the current level.
Petter Bjerksund, Arnt Ove Hopland and Guttorm Schjelderup: Calculation of tax costs necessarily requires data for tax and income, and we only get such data after the tax has been paid. A forward-looking, speculative method does not strengthen the tax debate.
Petter Bjerksund, Arnt Ove Hopland and Guttorm Schjelderup: If we remove the wealth tax, the effective tax is greatly reduced for the rich. For an investor, the tax drops from 21 percent to 15 percent just by assuming that the share capital is unlisted, not listed.
Petter Bjerksund and Guttorm Schjelderup: Menon's "summary of knowledge" is tax propaganda. It polarises the debate, undermines NHO's reputation and prevents a tax policy compromise that could give companies stable tax framework conditions.
The very wealthiest benefit from a far lower effective tax burden compared to those earning slightly less, a new study shows.
Petter Bjerksund, Guttorm Schjelderup and Floris T. Zoutman: Menon's tax report for NHO misleads readers. It inflates the importance of wealth tax and sets up calculations that falsely double the effective average tax rate.
Petter Bjerksund and Guttorm Schjelderup: It is not a good idea to remove the exemption method. But we can improve shareholder taxation by treating losses and gains from share sales equally, as well as raising the shielding rate.
Guttorm Schjelderup: My NHH colleagues Jøril Mæland and Karin Thorburn want to remove wealth tax and are concerned with distribution. But they do not propose alternative and equally effective proposals for redistribution.