Luisa Wallossek – Discovering Tax Systems Research in Tampere
Postdoctoral Researcher Luisa Wallossek (University of Oslo) spent two weeks on a research visit at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Tax Systems Research in Tampere in May 2026. In this blogpost Luisa reflects on her stay in the Sauna Capital of the World, and shares key takeaways from her stay.
Tax systems research
How do people behave in complex tax systems? And how does their behavior impact effective taxation? These are questions that I want to answer with my research, and it was a great opportunity to work on these topics for two weeks at FIT, where many bright public economists work on related questions. I presented ongoing work on tax non-filing and its impact on effective taxation in South Africa and received very useful feedback for how to proceed in this project. FIT researchers bring broad expertise on tax systems and some even work with South African tax data, which made it the perfect place to discuss this paper. At the same time, I also learned what FIT researchers are working on, with many exciting questions related to taxation and other public policy topics.
Register data across countries
My visit to FIT was made possible by a fellowship from the Finnish Infrastructure for Register-Based Research (FIRE) and I work with register data every day. So naturally, we had many conversations about similarities and differences in register data across countries. For my research, I am currently working with German, Norwegian, and South African register data and it was interesting to compare my experience with those of the FIT researchers with the Finnish register data. Clearly, the Nordic countries stand out as top of class when it comes to register data, but there still are some nuanced differences between Finnish and Norwegian data and their usage. What makes it really interesting to compare Finnish and Norwegian data is different policy designs in these two otherwise relatively similar countries. For the future, I hope that we can explore those a bit more and maybe combine register data from both countries to better understand how taxpayers behave under different tax environments.
Life in Tampere
The Nordics share not only great register data but also largely overlap in their culture and everyday life. Nevertheless, you can notice some differences. While it’s hard for me to tell whether Finns or Norwegians have the higher filter coffee consumption, Finland clearly has the better lunch culture (sorry not sorry Norway) – and of course the better saunas. Tampere considers itself the sauna capital and it did not disappoint. Trying a proper public Finnish sauna for the first time in my life was a great experience. And Tampere’s lakes also make for beautiful running routes. But even more important than the lakes and sauna, what made my visit to Tampere most memorable are the people at FIT. It is a fantastic group of very nice people who do very cool tax research and made me feel at home right away.
Kiitos and hope to see you all soon!
Author: Luisa Wallossek, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Oslo
