Gabriel Zucman

Gabriel Zucman (French pronunciation: [ɡabʁijɛl zykman]; born 30 October 1986) is a French-American economist known for his expertise on tax havens. He has been a chaired professor at the Paris School of Economics since 2023, Summer Research Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, and the director of the EU Tax Observatory in Paris. Zucman has argued for a global wealth tax on centimillionaires and richer high-net-worth individuals. The author of The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens (2015), Zucman is known for his research on tax havens and corporate tax havens. Zucman's research has found that the leading corporate tax havens are all OECD–compliant, and that tax disputes between high–tax locations and havens are very rare. His papers are some of the most cited papers on research into tax havens. Zucman is also known for his work on the quantification of the financial scale of base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) tax avoidance techniques employed by multinationals in corporate tax havens, through which he identified Ireland as the world's largest corporate tax haven, based on profit-shifting measures, in 2018. In 2018, Zucman was the recipient of the Prize for the Best Young Economist in France, awarded by the Cercle des économistes and Le Monde in recognition of his research on tax evasion and avoidance and their economic consequences. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 2023, a prize for economists under the age of 40.

Early life and education Zucman was born in Paris in 1986, the son of two French doctors. His mother is an immunology researcher while his father treats HIV patients. He is Jewish from his father's side. In interviews, Zucman has described the "traumatic political event of my youth" as being when Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the final rounds of the 2002 French presidential election. He was 15 at the time. Later, in 2018, Zucman said of that event: "A lot of my political thinking since then has been focused on how we can avoid this disaster from happening again. So far, we've failed". From 2005 to 2010, Zucman attended the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, one of France's Grandes Écoles. Thereafter, he earned an MSc degree in Economic Analysis and Policy in 2008 and a PhD in Economics in 2013, both from the Paris School of Economics. His doctoral dissertation, under the supervision of Thomas Piketty, explored whether the wealthy left France due to its wealth tax. It received the French Economic Association's award for best dissertation in 2014.

Career After finishing his studies, Zucman worked for a year as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley) before accepting a position as assistant professor of economics at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the same position at UC Berkeley, being currently on leave from LSE. Moreover, Zucman has worked as co-director of the World Wealth and Income Database (WID), a database aiming at the provision of access to extensive data series on the world distribution of income and wealth, since 2015. Besides his research and teaching activities, Zucman has refereed for several economic journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, Econometrica, and the Journal of Political Economy. He also co–founded and acted as editor–in–chief for Regards croisés sur l'économie, a review aimed at exposing the French general public to academic research in economics. In 2019, the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government voted to offer Zucman a tenured position in the department, but the president and provost of Harvard University blocked it. Zucman is the founding director of the EU Tax Observatory, an independent research laboratory hosted by the Paris School of Economics. In 2023, he was elected as a "professeur des universités" (tenured professor) in the department of economics at the Ecole normale supérieure and at the Paris School of Economics. In 2025, France's Socialist Party endorsed a proposal by Zucman for a 2% wealth tax targeting the top 0.01% of wealth holders in the 2026 national budget.

Research

Zucman is known for his research on tax evasion and international tax avoidance, but has made contributions to the field of public economics more broadly. Much of Zucman's research is on issues of economic inequality. Zucman himself says, "a lot of my work is about trying to improve our measurement tools." In August 2014 in Capital is Back, Zucman and French economist Thomas Piketty investigate the evolution of aggregate wealth–to–income ratios in the top eight developed economies, reaching back as far as 1700 in the case of the US, UK, Germany, and France, and find that wealth–income ratios have risen from about 200–300% in 1970 to 400–600% in 2010, levels unknown since the 18th and 19th centuries. Most of the change can be explained by the long-run recovery of asset prices, the slowdown of productivity, and population growth. Zucman has co-written several papers with Piketty. A second focus is his research on tax havens. In his 2015 book The Hidden Wealth of Nations, Zucman uses the systematic anomalies in international investment positions to show that the net foreign asset positions of rich countries are generally underestimated because they don't capture most of the assets held by households in offshore tax havens. Based on his calculations, he finds about 8% of the global financial wealth of households, or $7.6 trillion, to be held in tax havens, three–quarters of which go undeclared. In 2017–18, Zucman focused on the scale of multinational tax avoidance by base erosion and profit shifting ("BEPS") tools in the largest corporate tax havens. Zucman believes Ireland, recognised as a major corporate tax haven, is still materially underestimated by Orbis–database studies due to technical factors (even though these studies rank Ireland as the 5th largest global corporate Conduit OFC). Research published by Zucman, Tørsløv and Wier in June 2018, showed that Ireland is the largest corporate tax haven in the world, even larger than the entire Caribbean corporate tax haven system. This research also showed that tax disputes between high–tax jurisdictions and corporate tax havens are extremely rare, and that tax disputes really only occur between high–tax jurisdictions.

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