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存在的争议提供重要的新证据：税收激励是否是刺激国家经济增长的一种具有成本效益的手段。以前的研究依靠统计分析来确定州税和地方税对州经济增长的影响，同时控制影响增长的其他因素。这个项目将利用一个重要的解释变量的优越的测量？州税和地方税？并测试结果对所使用的税收措施的敏感性。以前对营业税对经济增长影响的大多数估计都采用了广泛的平均税收衡量标准，比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，才是利润最大化投资行为的关键。该项目开发并使用了边际税率，即一个州的新商业投资所产生的额外税收，该税率来源于一个具有代表性的公司模型，该模型结合了分摊公式、州和地方税收激励以及州和地方税收系统的其他特征。事实上，边际税率与以往研究中通常采用的平均税率之间的关系非常差。这使人们对跨州经济发展政策评估中先前对税收对经济增长影响程度估计的准确性产生了怀疑。为了调查可能的偏差，研究人员将使用替代税收措施和各种功能形式来估计美国20个州的多个增长方程。过去15年来，学术研究人员形成了一种共识，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持不同意见）。这反过来意味着，税收激励措施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，激励才是好政策。另一方面，公共经济发展官员仍然相信，激励措施不仅能创造就业机会，还能增加收入。该项目有助于将学术辩论的焦点重新集中在有关州和地方营业税对经济增长影响的可复制发现上。由于本项目中的边际营业税措施与常用措施有很大不同，因此本研究将为这一争论提供重要线索。

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.