ISET prides itself on the diversity of its multi-national composition; faculty members have come from Germany, Israel, Norway, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and Italy. The institute is therefore very happy to add Sweden to the list, with the arrival of Lotta Björklund Larsen, a Ph.D. holder from Stockholm University.

Throughout spring 2019, Lotta will collaborate with the Private Sector Development Research Unit on an assessment of the Georgian tax lottery in 2012. She will also hold a few seminars on tax compliance issues presenting international as well as her own research, and organize a workshop on applying qualitative methods in tax research. This project has been made possible by a grant from The Swedish Institute Visby Programme.

Lotta earned her Ph.D. in social anthropology from Stockholm University, and also holds a BA in economics. The notion of “why we pay tax and how we are made to pay tax” steers her research interests, which focus on issues such as tax compliance, co-operative compliance initiatives, tax gap, the informal economy, the shared economy, and the digitization of society and its implications on taxation. In her research, she has engaged with tax authorities, corporate and private taxpayers, as well as tax avoiders. She recently led a Nordic research project within the Horizon2020-funded project FairTax, wherein a qualitative comparison of cooperative compliance projects between large corporations and tax administrations was made.

Recent publications include A Fair Share of Tax: A Fiscal Anthropology of Contemporary Sweden (2018) available at Palgrave Macmillan and Shaping Taxpayers. Values in action at the Swedish Tax Agency (2017). A discussion about the book is available as a podcast on the New Books Network.

Lotta is very excited to become a part of ISET’s vibrant community, while the institute is glad to have established a new partnership with such an accomplished scholar.