Oscar Barrera-Rodriguez

Our new website is live! 🎉 A platform dedicated to exploring the link between wealth concentration and the cracks in democracy. Great work on wealth inequality, profit shifting via intellectual property, and the challenges facing democracy is coming soon! Excited to share! 🌍

More swipes. Less sex.

Many thanks to Dr Oscar Barrera, UCD School of Politics and International Relations and Democracy Challenge, for participating in our seminar series and giving a very informative and interesting presentation titled, " Winner-Takes-All: Corporate Tax Policy, and Wealth Concentration in the USA”. #UCD #GearyInstitute #Economics

👋Excited to see our paper forthcoming in the Journal of Public Economics! We construct a new global public spending database 1800-2025 and use it to revisit the relationship between human capital and economic growth in the very long run. Paper here! amory-gethin.fr/files/pdf/Bhar…

Corporate profits are highly concentrated — and taxing them hits the super rich. As corporate tax declined, states lost a key brake on wealth. Tax avoidance isn’t about revenue. It’s about power — and democracy. democracychallenged.com/2026/01/07/how…

California wants to tax billionaires with a 5% wealth tax and the CEO of Nvidia, who would have to pay $8 billion on his $163 billion fortune, says it like it is: that's perfectly fine! 🧵

On our Challenged Democracy Project: The U.S. tax system had an "fiscal anchor" to restrained extreme wealth concentration: the Corporate Income Tax. As CIT rates dropped from 46% to 21%, that anchor has weakened, allowing the top 0.001% to pull away. tinyurl.com/Winners-take-a…

#inequality day @DEHES_UNIGE with presentations by @odbarrerar at midday on profits and concentration in the US and @ @IZMartinez86 in the evening on inequalities and redistribution in Switzerland. Come along if you are in the area!

Hi #EconTwitter, I’m on the job market with a new paper w/ @mgiaccobasso. We run a field experiment in 🇫🇷 to test a key assumption in signaling models: do students actually know the wage premium to educational credentials, and how do they respond when we correct their beliefs?

“For whom does war toll?” For those who profit. Defense giants’ revenues have climbed since 2021 as NATO allies hit 2% of GDP on defense. @Aidan_Regan on how conflict becomes cash flow: Read: tinylink.net/yeBqm

(6/8) Our study compares Europe and the United States and challenges the widespread belief that rising inequality in the US since the 1980s has fueled innovation and productivity, especially in high-tech sectors. In fact, we find the opposite.

A woman from a rural working-class family - one of 14 siblings, raised in social housing and shaped by left-wing values - wins a landslide in Ireland’s presidential election. Yet millionaire businessmen and women insist the “spoil the vote” campaign is the real victor. #Aras25

@CeciliaRikap has been one of the key thinkers inspiring this piece. Her work develops the theoretical framework of creative appropriation and creative accumulation -- on how Big Tech captures innovation instead of being disrupted by it. 👇 academic.oup.com/icc/article/33…

New blog - From Creative Destruction to Creative Accumulation The 25 Nobel in Eco - innovation drives growth through creative destruction. Today, innovation seems less about destroying the old - and more about accumulating power within the same firms. tinyurl.com/4v8hftjr

Billionaire wealth didn’t just happen. In our new blog post @Aidan_Regan and I show how profit concentration and generous corporate tax policies have fueled one of the most extreme accumulations of private wealth in history. Read more: democracychallenged.com/2025/10/09/pro…

New on Democracy Challenged: Why do we argue that Corporate Profit Taxation can be a more effective Wealth Tax? In our latest entry, we show how taxing profits acts as a check on wealth accumulation & market power - a hidden form of antitrust. democracychallenged.com/2025/09/22/tax…

Hiring part-time RA! Join our UCD/WID project on profit & wealth concentration and corporate tax in the US. Skills: scraping SEC 10-Ks, data analysis (R/Stata/Python), interest in inequality & governance. Deadline: Aug 15 Apply: CV + 300 words → aidan.regan@ucd.ie

Tesla’s tax machine at work. 💸 Transfer pricing + profit shifting = tax savings → free cash flow → buybacks → Musk’s wealth → political influence. It’s not just tax planning, it’s power concentration. Full blog 👇 democracychallenged.com/2025/06/17/tes…

How Ireland became the Saudi Arabia of siphoned-off global profits The economics referring to our work project @Aidan_Regan @democracychall.bsky.social "...profits booked in Ireland far exceeds the substance of local operations" economist.com/europe/2025/06…

@eannaoc @Aidan_Regan Absolutely. The massive services deficit IE has with the US reflects the other side of the same coin: capital recycling. The pharma surplus is matched by an IP-heavy services deficit. The capital’s just spinning in a circle, inflating trade stats and distorting reality. Thanks

@odbarrerar @Aidan_Regan Don’t forget Services. Ireland had a Services deficit of €130 billion with the USA in 2023. Now do your sums again cso.ie/en/releasesand…

📝Don't miss our new post Strip Out Pharma and Ireland, and Over 40% of the EU’s U.S. Trade Surplus Disappears by professor @Aidan_Regan ➡️ democracychallenged.com/2025/05/29/van… The same capital makes a full circle, inflating exports and GDP, distorting what trade stats really mean.