For more information visit Skatteforsk - Centre for Tax Research.
Authors
Mona Barake (Norwegian University of Life Sciences), Andreas Økland (Norwegian University of Life Sciences) & Elvin Le Pouhaër (Paris School of Economics)
Abstract
This article studies the population of cryptocurrency owners, their portfolios and their position in the wealth distribution. We first use Norwegian tax returns to investigate the cryptocurrency portfolios declared for tax purposes. We then use a battery of novel data sources and newly produced statistics to understand non-compliance across different margins and construct a credible estimate of the actual population of cryptocurrency owners in Norway as of 2021. We find that close to 5 percent of the adult population owns cryptocurrency, while only 0.85 percent of the adult population declares owning cryptocurrency in tax records, suggesting a 17 percent overall compliance rate. We also establish that the compliance rate varies with age, but not wealth. The tax return data, together with our granular estimates of non-compliance, lets us describe how cryptocurrency ownership varies across demographic and socioeconomic groups. We find that cryptocurrency owners are notably younger than the typical owners of traditional types of assets, but not less wealthy. Cryptocurrency has become a considerable wealth object among younger generations: Our estimate is that cryptocurrency was in total more than 10 percent of the financial portfolios of households in the age group 30-39 in 2021.
Keywords: Portfolio Choice, Cryptocurrency, Inequality, Tax Compliance
JEL: G51, H26, D31