The purpose of the meeting was to strengthen the dialogue between NFS and central policy institutions that make active use of research in their work on taxation and public policy. Representatives from the Norwegian Tax Administration (Skatteetaten) and the Ministry of Finance (Finansdepartementet) were invited to the Department of Economics at UiO to hear about ongoing NFS projects and to discuss how the results can inform future policy design and decisions.
Research Presentations
Five NFS-affiliates presented recent and ongoing projects:
- ''Digital nudges, audits and penalty tax''
- Andreas Kotsadam presented joint work with collaborators in NFS and the Norwegian Tax Administration on how different enforcement tools affect tax compliance. Using large-scale field experiments, the project studies how digital reminders during the tax filing process, audits and the use of additional tax (tilleggsskatt) influence the reporting of wage income and deductions over time.
- ''VAT compliance and adaptive experiments''
- Andreas Makoto Fukuda Andersen presented a pre-registered study examining the effect of VAT audits on future compliance. The study is a collaboration between the tax administration and researchers at NFS. A low-cost, desk-based audit was randomly assigned to a sample of newly formed VAT-liable firms. He reported that approximately 10 percent of the audited firms had reporting errors. The results show no long-term effects of the audit on subsequent compliance. In addition, Andreas presented a framework for more targeted tax compliance interventions based on adaptive experiments.
- ''Labour supply responses to top income taxation''
- Gaute Torsvik presented joint work with Magne Mogstad, Morten Håvarstein and other co-authors (Graber and Vestad), where they study how high high-income earners respond to changes in marginal tax rates using Norwegian data and recent tax reforms. The project decomposes the elasticity of taxable income into substitution and income effects across the income distribution and analyses the efficiency costs of higher top tax rates.
- ''Who bears the burden of payroll taxes at the top?''
- Ragnhild Schreiner presented joint work with Gaute Torsvik and Gjermund Sterri Yndesdal on the incidence of a temporary surcharge on employer payroll taxes for high earners. The results suggest that firms largely absorbed the extra tax by adjusting wages and the composition of their workforce, for example by hiring relatively more lower-paid workers, rather than passing the full burden on to top earners.
- ''Can gas slow down the green transition?''
- Katinka Holtsmark presented ongoing research on how natural gas interacts with coal and renewable energy in power markets. The project studies whether increased gas production and exports may crowd out investments in renewable energy in the longer run, potentially creating what the authors refer to as a “gas trap”.
After the presentations, representatives from the Norwegian Tax Administration and the Ministry of Finance offered comments on the projects and reflected on how the findings relate to current policy challenges. They also provided suggestions for future research questions and possible adjustments to ongoing projects, ensuring that NFS research remains closely connected to the needs of policymakers.
The meeting underlined NFS’ role as a bridge between frontier academic research and practical policy work in Norway, and participants expressed interest in continuing this type of user meeting in the coming years.