Tax Reform and Entrepreneurial Activity
Tax Reform and Entrepreneurial Activity
复制标题
税收改革与创业活动
DOI：
10.1086/tpe.20.20061904
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发表时间：
2006
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
R. Gordon
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
J. Cullen;R. Gordon
本文的目的是预测可行的税制改革对美国创业活动程度的影响。为了做到这一点，我们借鉴了我们最近所做的工作，评估了税收结构通过多种途径影响创业活动的数量，并估计了行为对这些激励措施的反应。利用这些估计，我们预测，税制改革对创业活动的影响可能非常敏感，因为目前旨在鼓励小企业冒险的税收规定是否仍是税法的一部分。如果它们保持不变，我们预测，转向霍尔-拉布什卡统一税将使创业活动的总量基本不受影响，尽管这将导致高技能人群的活动减少，而低技能人群的活动增加。然而，如果在根本性税制改革过程中，不允许结转“净营业亏损”，并废除第1244条允许将小企业的股本资本损失重新归类为普通亏损的规定，那么整体创业活动可能会减少一半以上。魔鬼在于细节。在总统的税改委员会公布税改建议后，税改将很快成为政策议程的首要议题。税制改革有很多可能的目标。我们在本文中关注的目标是通过使创业活动更具吸引力来释放经济中的创造性能量。可能提出的任何改革在多大程度上有助于鼓励更多的创业活动？为什么要把重点放在创业活动本身？至少可以追溯到熊彼特(1976)，创业活动一直被视为经济增长的关键来源。人们的假设是，当个人和公司提出新产品、新工艺或新的经济活动组织方式时，给社会带来的好处远远超过他们个人获得的好处。因此，个人从事创业活动所面临的激励是不够的。这种“外部性”的可能性是普遍存在的。一位企业家产生的新想法通常可以被另一家公司复制。在许多情况下，复制公司成功地占领了市场和由此产生的利润。有了竞争，也可以通过更低的价格与消费者分享利益。新想法还可以让未来的企业家更容易在其他市场发现有利可图的机会，这也是最初的企业家没有获得的好处。在创业活动产生这种溢出效应的程度上，有经济理由试图进行干预，以鼓励更多此类活动。税收制度可以通过多种方式提供这种鼓励。对企业与工资和薪金收入或亏损与利润的不同税收待遇，可能会改变从事高风险企业的动机。此外，创业公司通常是少数人持股的，部分原因是柠檬问题。由于一个人对新产品有价值的想法，以及实现这个想法所需的技能，可能不愿意将由此产生的风险强加给自己和她的家人，因此这些柠檬问题导致的风险错配意味着创新活动减少。通过吸收一部分损失和利润，税收有助于与其他纳税人分担企业家面临的风险，从而可以增加企业家承担的风险。我们最近的研究重点是定性和定量地评估税收结构如何影响创业活动的数量。在这篇文章中，我们在过去工作的基础上，评估过去的税收改革对创业活动总量的影响程度。然后，我们研究可能的税收改革提案可能如何影响未来几年美国的创业活动数量。
The objective of this paper is to forecast the effects of plausible tax reforms on the extent of entrepreneurial activity in the United States. To do so, we draw on recent work we have done assessing the many routes through which the tax structure affects the amount of entrepreneurial activity, and estimating the responsiveness of behavior to these incentives. Using these estimates, we forecast that the effect of tax reforms on entrepreneurial activity can be very sensitive to whether or not current tax provisions aimed to encourage risk-taking in small firms remain part of the tax code. If they are left in place, we forecast that a shift to a Hall-Rabushka flat tax will leave the overall amount of entrepreneurial activity largely unaffected, although it will lead to a drop in activity among the highly skilled and an offsetting increase in activity among the less highly skilled. However, if in the process of fundamental tax reform, "net operating loss" carrybacks are disallowed, and section 1244 allowing capital losses on equity in small businesses to be reclassified as ordinary losses is repealed, then overall entrepreneurial activity could fall by more than half. The devil is in the details. Tax reform will soon be at the top of the policy agenda, following the release of the tax reform proposals from the president's Tax Reform Commission. Tax reform has many possible objectives. The objective we focus on in this paper is to unleash the creative energies in the economy through making entrepreneurial activity more attractive. To what degree will any of the likely reforms that might be proposed help to encourage more entrepreneurial activity? Why a focus on entrepreneurial activity per se? Going back at least to Schumpeter (1976), entrepreneurial activity has been viewed as the key source of economic growth. The presumption has been that individuals and firms, when they come up with new products, new processes, or new ways of organizing economic activity, generate far more benefits to society than they receive personally. As a result, the incentives that an individual faces to engage in entrepreneurial activity are inadequate. The potential for such "externalities" is pervasive. The new ideas generated by an entrepreneur can often be copied by another firm. In many cases, the copying firm succeeds in capturing the market and the resulting profits. With competition, benefits are also shared with consumers through a lower price. New ideas can also make it easier for future entrepreneurs to identify profitable opportunities in other markets, benefits again not received by the initial entrepreneur. To the extent entrepreneurial activity generates such spillovers, there are economic grounds to try to intervene to encourage more such activity. The tax system can provide this kind of encouragement in a variety of ways. Differential tax treatment of business versus wage and salary income or of losses versus profits can change the incentives to engage in a risky venture. In addition, entrepreneurial firms are normally closely held, in part due to lemons problems. Since an individual with a valuable idea for a new product and the skills needed to bring this idea to fruition may not be willing to impose the resulting risks on herself and her family, the misallocation of risks caused by these lemons problems implies less innovative activity. By absorbing a share of the losses as well as the profits, taxes help share the risks faced by entrepreneurs with other taxpayers and can thereby increase the amount of entrepreneurial risk-taking. The focus of our recent research has been on assessing, both qualitatively and quantitatively, how the tax structure affects the amount of entrepreneurial activity. In this paper, we build on our past work to assess the degree to which past tax reforms have affected the aggregate amount of entrepreneurial activity. We then examine how possible tax reform proposals would likely affect the amount of entrepreneurial activity in the United States in coming years.