Cristobal Young, associate professor of sociology, has spent more than 10 years studying the consequences of elite taxation in California, New Jersey and across the country. Using big data from the tax returns of all top-earners, he has found there are many misperceptions about tax flight—movement by the wealthy to avoid high taxes. He shares his findings in an op-ed in the New York Daily News.
“To better understand the migration of the rich, I analyzed tax return data from all million-dollar income-earners in America,” Young writes in the piece. “The dataset includes 3.7 million top-earning individuals, who filed more than 45 million tax returns across a dozen years. This showed where millionaires live and where they move to. It turns out that place still matters for the rich — much more so than we might think."