CAREER: Taxes and Innovation: Optimal Taxation and the Effects of Taxes on Entrepreneurs, Inventors, and Firms' Innovation

研究者通过一个新的理论框架来研究创新的最优税收政策，该框架能够对税收改革进行彻底的定量评估，并进一步提供新的经验证据，证明税收对创新的关键代理人（即发明家和企业）的影响，基于新的大规模数据，将行政税收、劳动力市场和专利数据联系起来，并基于历史上的发明家和税收数据。通过探索税收与创新之间的这种联系，该项目得出了经过严格研究的政策教训，为税收和创新政策提供信息，这对提高生活水平和竞争力至关重要。通过建立一个关于“税收与创新”的互动网站，以及与学生合作开发的开源在线免费教科书，该项目具有很强的教育推广成分。为了研究研发政策和企业税收的最优设计，本项目首先建立了一个新的理论框架，该框架包含了一个包含创新溢出效应、不确定性和企业与政府之间信息不对称的动态企业模型。本项目进一步估计数据中的模型，以提出具体的政策建议，并量化非最优政策的损失或收益。特别是，研究者使用一个将企业家和发明家与其税收记录和当地劳动力市场状况联系起来的新构建的数据集来研究税收激励对企业家和发明家的影响。最后，该项目利用专利、发明家、公司及其研发实验室和州一级个人和公司所得税的新历史数据，研究了1880年至2006年美国个人所得税和公司税对公司和发明家创新的影响。这可以提高我们对税收（包括企业和个人收入）对发明者和企业创新的数量和质量的长期影响的理解。

The investigator studies optimal tax policy for innovation through a new theoretical framework that enables thorough quantitative assessments of tax reforms, and further provides new empirical evidence on the effects of taxes on the key agents for innovation, namely inventors and firms, based on new large-scale data linking administrative tax, labor market, and patent data and on historical inventor and tax data. By exploring this link between taxes and innovation, this project yields rigorously studied policy lessons to inform tax and innovation policy, which is key for the improvement of living standards and for competitiveness. The project has a strong educational outreach component through the creation of an interactive website on "Taxes and innovation", and an open-source online free textbook developed collaboratively with students. To study the optimal design of R&D policies and firm taxation, this project first develops a new theoretical framework that encompasses a dynamic firm model with spillovers from innovation, uncertainty, and asymmetric information between firms and the government. This project further estimates the model in the data to yield concrete policy recommendations and to quantify the losses or gains from non-optimal policies. In particular, the investigator studies the effects of tax incentives on entrepreneurs and inventors using a newly constructed dataset linking entrepreneurs and inventors to their tax records and to local labor market conditions. Lastly, the project studies the effects of personal income and corporate taxation on innovation by firms and inventors in the U.S. from 1880 to 2006 using new historical data on patents, inventors, firms and their R&D labs, and state-level personal and corporate income taxes. This can improve our understanding of the long-run effects of taxes -- both on corporate and personal income -- on the quantity and quality of innovation by both inventors and firms.