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

研究人员通过一个新的理论框架研究了最优的创新税收政策，该框架能够对税收改革进行彻底的量化评估，并基于连接行政税收、劳动力市场和专利数据的新的大规模数据以及历史发明家和税收数据，进一步提供了关于税收对创新的关键动因，即发明者和企业的影响的新的经验证据。通过探索税收和创新之间的这种联系，该项目产生了认真研究的政策教训，为税收和创新政策提供信息，这是提高生活水平和竞争力的关键。该项目通过创建一个关于“税收和创新”的互动网站和与学生合作编写的开放源码在线免费教科书，具有强大的教育宣传部分。为了研究R&D政策和企业税收的最优设计，该项目首先开发了一个新的理论框架，该框架包含了一个动态的企业模型，该模型考虑了创新、不确定性和企业与政府之间的信息不对称带来的溢出效应。该项目进一步估计数据中的模型，以提出具体的政策建议，并量化非最佳政策的损失或收益。特别是，研究人员使用一个新构建的数据集，将企业家和发明家与他们的纳税记录和当地劳动力市场状况联系起来，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以及州级个人所得税和公司所得税的新历史数据，研究了1880年至2006年个人所得税和公司税对美国公司和发明家创新的影响。这可以提高我们对税收--对公司和个人收入--对发明者和公司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.