Using Administrative Data to Study U.S. Private Business Investment

该奖项资助旨在揭示私营企业投资的研究。私营企业占美国企业净收入的一半以上，是经济增长、财富和公共财政研究的核心。然而，人们对它们的活动知之甚少——最重要的是，这些企业为其所有者创造可观收入和财富所做的投资。主要原因是，大多数私人企业的资产都是无形的，是由所有者自己创造的，在企业出售之前不会出现在任何资产负债表上。来自企业销售的数据表明，这些资产占购买价格的大部分，包括无形资产，如客户名单、商品名称、现有员工、专有技术和商誉。该项目的总体目标是发展可用于衡量这些潜在投资的新理论，并最终研究它们在税收管理和政策设计中的作用。该项目将以两种方式推进我们的经验知识状态：(1)通过构建企业及其所有者的纵向面板，以便跟踪长期的商业活动；(2)通过量化商业投资在为这些企业及其所有者创造可观收入和财富方面的作用。目前缺乏关于私营企业投资的知识，因为它是基于商业调查，纵向面板有限，关于商业资产或转让的信息有限。这些项目将通过发展明确纳入可在出售时转让的自我创造的无形资产的理论，以及可以通过比较模拟纳税申报与实际纳税申报直接检验的理论预测，来提高我们的理论知识水平。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award funds research that seeks to shed light on private business investment. Privately-owned firms account for over half of US business net income and are central to studies of economic growth, wealth, and public finance. Yet little is known about their activities-most importantly, the investments these businesses make to generate significant incomes and wealth for their owners. The primary reason is that most private-business assets are intangibles that are self-created by the owners and do not appear on any balance sheet until the businesses are sold. Data from sales of businesses show that these assets account for most of the purchase price and include intangibles such as customer lists, trade names, workforce in place, know-how, and goodwill. The overall goal of the project is to develop new theory that can be used to measure these latent investments and ultimately to study their role for tax administration and policy design.The project would advance the state of our empirical knowledge in two ways: (1) by constructing longitudinal panels of business and their owners in order to track business activities over time and (2) by quantifying the role of business investments in generating significant incomes and wealth for these businesses and their owners. The current state of knowledge about private business investment is lacking because it is based on business surveys with limited longitudinal panels and limited information on business assets or transfers. The projects would advance the state of our theoretical knowledge by developing theory that explicitly incorporates self-created intangibles that are transferable upon sale, and theoretical predictions that can be directly tested by comparing simulated tax filings to actual ones.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.