Research

This paper presents a new way to tax excess profits. We propose to tax the rise in the stock market capitalization of companies that benefit from extraordinary circumstances, such as energy firms following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Targeting the rise in stock market capitalization (which is easily observable) makes the tax much harder to avoid than standard excess profit taxes, and allows to capture rents irrespective of where multinational companies book their profits. We apply this proposal to energy companies that are headquartered or have sales in the European Union. We estimate that taxing the January 2022 to September 2022 valuation gains of energy firms at a rate of 33% would generate around €80 billion in revenue (0.4% of GDP) for the European Union. We discuss implementation practicalities and compare our proposals to other plans made to tax excess profits.

This paper explores global perceptions and understanding of climate change and policies, examining factors that influence support for climate action and the impact of different types of information. We conduct large-scale surveys with 40,000 respondents from 20 countries, providing new international data on attitudes towards climate change and respondents' socioeconomic backgrounds and lifestyles. We identify three key perceptions affecting policy support: perceived effectiveness of policies in reducing emissions, their impact on low-income households, and their effect on respondents' households (self-interest). Educational videos clarifying policy mechanisms increase support for climate policies; those merely highlighting climate change's impacts do not.

This paper analyzes a unique micro-dataset capturing the ownership of about 800,000 properties in Dubai. We use this dataset to document patterns in cross-border real estate investments, a blind spot in the analysis of financial globalization. We obtain four main findings. First, offshore real estate in Dubai is large: at least $146 billion in foreign wealth is invested in the Dubai property market. This is twice as much as real estate held in London by foreigners through shell companies. Second, geographical proximity and historic ties are key determinants of foreign investments in Dubai. About 20% of offshore Dubai real estate is owned by investors from India and 10% by investors from the United Kingdom; other large investing countries include Pakistan, Gulf countries, Iran, Canada, Russia, and the United States. These patterns hold when focusing on the most affluent neighborhoods, with the main difference that Indian investments become relatively smaller and Russian investments larger. Third, a number of conflict-ridden countries and autocracies have large holdings in Dubai relative to the size of their economy, equivalent to 5%–10% of their GDP. This suggests that the official net foreign asset position of a number of lowincome economies is significantly under-estimated. Last, by matching properties owned by Norwegians to administrative tax records in Norway, we find that the probability to own offshore real estate rises with wealth, including within the very top of the wealth distribution. About 70% of Dubai properties owned by Norwegian taxpayers were not reported for tax purposes in 2019. These results suggest that the lack of cross-border exchange of information on real estate ownership is a significant issue for tax enforcement.

This note presents new evidence on the scale of foreign investment in the Dubai residential property market. Using new data comprising the ownership of a large share of the Dubai property market, we present updated estimates of foreign-owned real estate for the years 2020 and 2022. We find that foreign nationals hold around 43% of the total value of all residential property in the city. Foreign- owned residential real estate grew by 20%—around $23 billion—between the beginning of 2020 and early 2022. We also find evidence of a substantial boom in Russian interest in the city following the invasion of Ukraine, with both utility accounts and residential leases associated with Russian nationals increasing sharply. Relying on simple assumptions to allocate new property purchases across nationalities, we con- servatively estimate that Russians bought up to $2.4 billion worth of existing properties and a further $3.9 billion of in-development properties since the invasion.