Kristoffer Berg, Ph.D.

Taxation of corporations and shareholder

In this research project, Kristoffer Berg studies the trade-off between different ways of taxing corporate profits. While corporate income tax rates have steadily fallen over the last decades, inequality has increased. This project studies whether countries should move in the direction of higher shareholder taxation in combination with lower corporate income taxation. On the one hand, a benefit of corporate income taxation at source is that part of the tax burden may fall on international rather than resident investors. On the other hand, the corporate income tax base may be more elastic than the shareholder income tax base, such that its taxation leads to larger efficiency losses and higher incidence on resident workers. The project develops a tractable sufficient statistic framework to study the choice between corporate and shareholder income taxation. The project concludes with a cross-country application.
More broadly, Kristoffer Berg’s research interests are in public and welfare economics. He is mainly working on issues in optimal income taxation, typically combining theory and empirics to provide specific tax policy recommendations. He has conducted research on the tax policy implications of different views about fair taxation, the intergenerational effects of wealth taxation, and tax differentiation across groups such as gender, family size and organizational form.
Kristoffer Berg is a Research Fellow at the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, a Junior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, and an Associated Researcher at the Department of Economics, University of Oslo. He received his PhD from the University of Oslo, and has previously studied at the LSE, visited UC Berkeley and interned at the IMF.