Fiscal Incentives and Firm Growth

世界上许多国家都利用税收优惠来影响企业决策，旨在促进创新和生产力，并创造经济稳定。这项研究利用了一个新的数据集，并提供了一种新的方法来精确衡量企业如何应对两种不同的税收优惠。研究人员分析了以削减企业所得税为形式的大规模财政激励对研发投资的影响。调查人员还研究了增值税（VAT）改革对企业固定资产投资的影响，并评估了其在金融危机期间作为反周期财政刺激措施的作用。本研究的结果将为我们提供新的证据，说明民营企业如何应对税收政策的变化，并有助于我们评估导致美国在全球创新领导力方面的巨大变化的长期力量。本研究由财政激励和企业成长两个相关项目组成。第一个项目利用了中国企业所得税优惠政策的独特性，它产生了企业的支付函数的跳跃。然后，该项目实现了一个横截面的“聚束”估计，这是新颖的研发文献。基于这种政策变化和面板数据，研究人员使用一种新的因果效应估计，以进一步量化税收计划对企业生产率和财政成本的影响。 研究人员还在结构上估计模型，以匹配数据聚束模式和治疗效果。第二个方案考虑从生产型增值税改为消费型增值税，从而允许从增值税中直接扣除新的固定资产投资，大幅降低资金的使用成本。研究人员利用不同地区和行业政策推出时间的差异来量化企业投资对财政刺激的反应。然后，该项目利用微观层面数据的丰富异质性，以确定这些反应在不同公司之间的差异。

Many countries around the world use tax incentives to influence firm decisions, aiming to promote innovation and productivity as well as to create economic stability. This research exploits a novel data set and provides a new way to precisely measure how firms respond to two different kinds of tax incentives. The investigators analyze the effects of a large fiscal incentive for R&D investment in the form of a corporate income tax cut. The investigators also examine the impact of value-added tax (VAT) reform on firm fixed asset investment and assess its role as a counter-cyclical fiscal stimulus during the financial crisis. The results of this project will give us new evidence on how private enterprises respond to changes in tax policy, and will help us to evaluate the long-run forces that have resulted large changes in challenges to U.S. leadership in global innovation.This research consists of two related projects on fiscal incentives and firm growth. The first project exploits unique features of the Chinese corporate income tax incentives, which generate jumps in firm's payoff function. This project then implements a cross-sectional "bunching" estimator that is novel in the R&D literature. Building on this policy variation and panel data, the investigators use a new estimator of casual effect to further quantify the effects of the tax program on firm productivity and on fiscal costs. The investigators also structurally estimate the model to match the data bunching patterns and the treatment effects. The second project considers changing from production-based VAT to consumption-based VAT, thus allowing the direct deduction of new fixed asset investment from VAT and substantially reducing the user cost of capital. The investigators exploit variations in the timing of the policy roll out in different regions and industries to quantify the response of firm investment to the fiscal stimulus. This project then leverages on the rich heterogeneity of micro-level data to identify how these responses differ across firms.