OECD Economics Department Working Papers
Working papers from the Economics Department of the OECD that cover the full range of the Department’s work including the economic situation, policy analysis and projections; fiscal policy, public expenditure and taxation; and structural issues including ageing, growth and productivity, migration, environment, human capital, housing, trade and investment, labour markets, regulatory reform, competition, health, and other issues.
The views expressed in these papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the OECD or of the governments of its member countries.
- ISSN : 18151973 (en ligne)
- https://doi.org/10.1787/18151973
Do Corporate Taxes Reduce Productivity and Investment at the Firm Level?
Cross-Country Evidence from the Amadeus Dataset
This paper uses a stratified sample of firms across OECD economies over the period 1996-2004 to analyse
the effects of corporate taxes on productivity and investment. Applying a differences-in-differences
estimation strategy which exploits differential effects of corporate taxes on firms with different
profitability, it is found that corporate taxes have a negative effect on productivity at the firm level. The
effect is negative across firms of different size and age classes except for the small and young, which may
be attributable to the relatively low profitability of small and young firms. The negative effect of corporate
taxes is particularly pronounced for firms that are catching up with the technological frontier. In the
investment analysis, the results suggest that corporate taxes reduce investment through an increase in the
user cost of capital. This may partly explain the negative productivity effects of corporate taxes if new
capital goods embody technological change.
Mots-clés: growth, fiscal policy, productivity
JEL:
H25: Public Economics / Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue / Business Taxes and Subsidies;
D24: Microeconomics / Production and Organizations / Production; Cost; Capital; Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity; Capacity;
H32: Public Economics / Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents / Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents: Firm;
E62: Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics / Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook / Fiscal Policy;
E22: Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics / Consumption, Saving, Production, Investment, Labor Markets, and Informal Economy / Investment; Capital; Intangible Capital; Capacity;
D21: Microeconomics / Production and Organizations / Firm Behavior: Theory
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