Welcome to seminar by Naomi Feldman on April 24th

The presentation is 24 April, in room 316 at Tårnbygningen, NMBU, from 12.15-13.00. We start with a simple lunch at 12.00.

Everyone is welcome to the presentation. To attend the lunch, please register by sending en e-mail to malgorzata.bernhardsen@nmbu.no before 21 April 12.00, including information regarding any allergies.

Naomi Feldman is Professor in Economics at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In particular, she studies how how the complexity of the tax code impacts the behavior of firms and individuals. Before joining the Hebrew University, she was employed at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, DC and spent a year at the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) in the Executive Office of the President as a Senior Economist in Tax Policy. In 2021, she began serving as co-editor of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and was also appointed to be a voting member on the Bank of Israel's Monetary Policy Committee. She is also a member of Skatteforsk's Scientific Advisory Board.

Feldman will present the paper: “The impact of Opportunity Zones on Commercial Investment and Economic Activity”, which is co-authored with Kevin Corinth. 

Abstract: A provision of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 offered tax incentives for investing in certain low-income areas in the United States called Opportunity Zones. The goal of this provision was to spur private investment in OZs in order to improve the economic well-being of their residents. Using a regression discontinuity design and data on the universe of all significant commercial investments in the United States, we find that OZ eligibility led to no statistically significant increase in investment in OZs. We can rule out at the 95 percent confidence level an increase in the probability of investment of more than 1.3 percentage points (4.9%), an increase in the number of annualized investments of more than 0.01 (6.7%), and an increase in annualized dollars of investment of more than $0.16 million per census tract (8.2%). These findings are supported by data from Mastercard that show no evidence of increased business activity nor consumer spending. Overall, our findings suggest that the impact of the OZ place-based investment incentives on economic improvement has thus far been limited.

 The full paper is found here.