Progressive taxation is a key pillar of democratic societies. But thanks to new research, there is now clear evidence that contemporary tax systems, instead of being progressive, do not effectively tax the wealthiest individuals.

This lecture will detail a proposal for a coordinated minimum tax ensuring that dollar billionaires pay at least 2% of their wealth in taxes each year. The lecture will discuss the feasibility of such a new form of international coordination, and the potential obstacles and benefits of such a measure.

Registration on this page is to watch the event online. To attend in-person at the Oxford Martin School, please register at https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/events/the-billionaire-tax

Gabriel Zucman is Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics and Ecole normale supérieure – PSL, Summer Research Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and founding Director of the EU Tax Observatory and the PSE Stone Center on Global Wealth Dynamics.

He is the author of articles published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, and of two books - The Hidden Wealth of Nations and The Triumph of Injustice, written with Emmanuel Saez. His research focuses on the accumulation, distribution, and taxation of global wealth and has renewed the analysis of the macroeconomic and distributional implications of globalization.

He received the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association in 2023. He was elected Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2024. In 2021 he was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. He was awarded the Bernacer Prize and a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2019, the Best Young French Economist Prize awarded by Le Monde and le Cercle des Economistes in 2018, and the Excellence Award in Global Economic Affairs from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in 2017.

'The billionaire tax: a (modest) proposal for the 21st century' with Prof Gabriel Zucman