Collaborative Research: The Impact of State and Local Taxes on Growth Using Improved Tax Measures

这项研究将为学术界和公共政策界长期争论的一个问题提供重要的新证据：税收优惠是否是刺激国家经济增长的一种具有成本效益的手段。以前的研究依赖于统计分析来确定州和地方税收对州经济增长的影响，控制其他影响增长的因素。该项目将利用关键解释变量的上级衡量标准？州税和地方税吗并测试结果对所用税收措施的敏感性。以前大多数关于营业税对经济增长影响的估计都采用了广泛的平均税收措施，如州税占州个人收入的百分比。然而，经济理论表明，边际成本，而不是平均成本，是利润最大化投资行为的重要因素。本项目开发并使用边际税率-在一个州新的商业投资所产生的额外税收-从一个代表性的公司模型中得出，该模型结合了分摊公式、州和地方税收激励措施以及州和地方税收系统的其他特征。实际上，边际税率与以往研究中通常采用的平均税率的相关性很差。这让人怀疑在跨州评估经济发展政策时，对税收对增长影响大小的先前估计的准确性。为了研究可能的偏差，研究人员将使用替代税收措施和各种函数形式来估计美国20个州的多个增长方程。过去15年来，学术研究人员达成了一个共识，即经济增长对营业税的敏感性很小（尽管一些学者对这一结论提出异议）。这反过来又意味着，税收激励措施并不能刺激足够的增长，以抵消激励措施造成的公共收入损失。因此，只有当公共利益超过税收损失时，激励措施才是好政策。另一方面，公共经济发展官员仍然认为，激励措施不仅创造就业机会，而且增加收入。 这个项目有助于重新关注学术辩论的可复制的结果，对经济增长的影响，国家和地方的营业税。由于本项目中的边际营业税措施与常用的措施有很大不同，因此本研究将对这一争论提供重要的启示。

This research will provide important new evidence on a long-standing controversy in academic and public policy circles: whether tax incentives are a cost-effective means of stimulating state economic growth. Previous research has relied on statistical analysis to determine the effect of state and local taxes on state economic growth, controlling for other factors that influence growth. This project will utilize a superior measure of the crucial explanatory variable?state and local taxes on business?and test the sensitivity of the results to the kind of tax measure used. Most previous estimates of business taxes' influence on growth have employed a broad, average tax measure such as state taxes as a percent of state personal income. Yet, economic theory suggests that marginal costs, not average costs, are what matters for profit-maximizing investment behavior. This project develops and uses a marginal tax rate -- the additional taxes resulting from new business investment in a state -- derived from a representative firm model that incorporates apportionment formulas, state and local tax incentives, and other features of the state and local tax system. Marginal tax rates are in fact very poorly related to the kinds of average tax rates typically employed in previous studies. This casts doubt on the accuracy of prior estimates of the size of the tax effect on growth in cross-state evaluations of economic development policy. To investigate the possible bias, the researchers will estimate multiple growth equations for 20 U.S. states using alternative tax measures and a variety of functional forms. Something of a consensus has developed among academic researchers over the past 15 years that the sensitivity of economic growth to business taxes is small (although some academics take issue with this conclusion). This in turn implies that tax incentives do not stimulate sufficient growth to offset the public revenue losses from the incentives. Incentives are good policy, then, only if the public benefits exceed the tax losses. Public economic development officials, on the other hand, continue to believe that incentives not only create jobs but augment revenue. This project helps to refocus scholarly debate on replicable findings about the impact of state and local business taxes on economic growth. Because the marginal business tax measures in this project differ considerably from the commonly used measures, this research will shed important light on this debate.