- A further three studies, focused on the US, examine the effect of income taxation on private sector R&D activities. Akcigit et al. (2020) demonstrate that higher income taxation has a negative effect on the quality and quantity of patents, as well as on the probability of generating a successful patent (with many citations). Moreover, R&D workers are less likely to locate to U.S. states with higher income taxation.
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- Acheson and Malone (2020) examine an Irish tax reform that, like the reform in the UK discussed above, caused a number of companies to unexpectedly become eligible for volume-based R&D tax credit schemes in 2009. In line with the results from the aforementioned studies, the authors find that tax credits have a positive impact on R&D expenditures of newly funded companies.
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Acheson, J. and R. Malone (2020), “Respect Your Elders: Evidence from Ireland’s R&D Tax Credit Reform”, The Economic and Social Review 51, 105-131.
- Agrawal, A., C. Rosell and T. S. Simcoe (2014), Do Tax Credits Affect R&D Expenditures by Small Firms? Evidence from Canada, National Bureau of Economic Research.
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Atanassov, J. and X. Liu (2020), “Can Corporate Income Tax Cuts Stimulate Innovation?”, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 55, 1415-1465.
- Atassanov and Liu (2020) study the effect of corporate tax increases and decreases in the US between 1988 and 2006. Like Mukherjee et al. (2017), they find that corporate tax cuts have a positive impact on the quality and quantity of companies’ innovation outputs.
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- Berger, P. G. (1993), “Explicit and Implicit Tax Effects of the R&D Tax Credit”, Journal of Accounting Research 31, 131-171.
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Bornemann, T., S. K. Laplante and B. Osswald (2020), “The Effect of Intellectual Property Boxes on Innovative Activity & Effective Tax Rates”, WU International Taxation Research Paper Series 2018-03.
Bozio, A., D. Irac and L. Py (2014), Impact of Research Tax Credit on R&D and Innovation: Evidence from the 2008 French Reform, Banque de France.
- Cai et al. (2018) examine the effect of a tax reform that entailed a 10 percent reduction in the corporate taxation rate for manufacturing firms founded in January 2002 or later. The authors show that the reduction had a positive effect on both innovation inputs and outputs of the affected firms; in particular, their number of patent applications increased by 5.7 percent on average. Chen et al. (2020) use a Chinese tax reform from 2008 to determine the effect of general tax breaks on private sector R&D expenditures. Here, firms whose expenditures are above a certain threshold benefit from the tax breaks, while firms below do not. The authors show that tax breaks increase R&D expenditures by 25 percent for large firms, 17 percent for medium firms, and 10 percent for small firms.
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Cai, J., Y. Chen and X. Wang (2018), “The Impact of Corporate Taxes on Firm Innovation: Evidence from the Corporate Tax Collection Reform in China”, NBER Working Paper 25146.
- Cantabene and Nascia (2014) use this setting to make a comparison between supported and non-supported companies, regardless of whether the latter had applied for funding or not. They show that the tax credit had a positive effect on absolute R&D expenditures as well as on R&D intensity. Acconcia and Cantabene (2018) consider the same tax reform but compare supported companies exclusively to those that were not supported but applied for funding. Their results confirm the findings by Cantabene and Nascia (2014).
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- Cantabene, C. and L. Nascia (2014), The Race for R&D Subsidies: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Tax Credits in Italy, Economia e Politica Industriale.
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- Chen, Z., Z. Liu, J. C. S. Serrato and D. Y. Xu (2020), “Notching R&D Investment with Corporate Income Tax Cuts in China”, American Economic Review 111, 2065-2100.
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- Dechezleprêtre, A., E. Einiö, R. Martin, K. T. Nguyen and J. van Reenen (2020), “Do Tax Incentives Increase Firm Innovation? An RD Design for R&D”, NBER Working Paper 22405.
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Fuest, C., A. Peichl and S. Siegloch (2018), “Do Higher Corporate Taxes Reduce Wages? Micro Evidence from Germany”, American Economic Review 108, 393-418.
- Guceri and Liu (2019) use the same reform to show that the eligible R&D expenditures of sudden SMEs—as opposed to their total R&D expenditures— increased by about 33 percent relative to firms not deemed SMEs.
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- Guceri, I. (2018), “Will the Real R&D Employees Please Stand Up? Effects of Tax Breaks on Firm-Level Outcomes”, International Tax and Public Finance 25, 1-63.
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- Guceri, I. and L. Liu (2019), “Effectiveness of Fiscal Incentives for R&D: Quasi-experimental Evidence”, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 11, 266-291.
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Guceri, I. and M. Albinowski (2021), “Investment Responses to Tax Policy under Uncertainty”, Journal of Financial Economics 141, 1147-1170.
- Haegeland and Moen (2007) show that the introduction of a tax credit scheme in Norway in 2002 boosted the growth rates of R&D expenditures, with the effect primarily driven by companies that conducted little or no R&D before. By contrast, the R&D expenditures of companies that had already conducted R&D continuously before 2002 hardly changed at all.
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- Hægeland, T. and J. Møen (2007), Input Additionality in the Norwegian R&D Tax Credit Scheme, Statistics Norway, Oslo.
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- Hines, J. R. (2007), On the Sensitivity of R&D to Delicate Tax Changes: The Behavior of US Multinationals in the 1980s, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
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Howell, A. (2016), “Firm R&D, Innovation and Easing Financial Constraints in China: Does Corporate Tax Reform Matter?”, Research Policy 45, 1996-2007.
Kasahara, H., K. Shimotsu and M. Suzuki (2014), “Does an R&D Tax Credit Affect R&D Expenditure? The Japanese R&D Tax Credit Reform in 2003”, Journal of the Japanese and International Economies 31, 72-97.
- Looking outside the US, three papers examine the effect of corporate taxation on R&D activities of private sector firms in China. Howell (2016) shows that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) increased their R&D expenditures following a reduction in the corporate tax burden, while privately owned enterprises (POEs) decreased them. However, both types of companies recorded more new products and processes. The author explains the differing impact of the reform on the R&D expenditures of SOEs and POEs by the fact that POEs invested more in physical capital that was not declared as R&D - which was now relatively cheaper for them - and were thus also able to increase their innovation outcomes.
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- More specifically, companies from states where corporate taxes were reduced file about 0.63 (0.79) more patents three (four) years later than comparable 65 EconPol Forum 4 / 2023 July Volume 24 ECONOMIC POLICY AND ITS IMPACT companies in states where taxes were left unchanged; moreover, each patent received an average of 0.75 additional citations. Corporate tax increases have an opposite impact, but their overall effect is smaller. The authors also demonstrate that small and less liquid firms respond more strongly to corporate taxation changes than large and solvent firms.
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Moretti, E. and D. J. Wilson (2014), “State Incentives for Innovation, Star Scientists, and Jobs: Evidence from Biotech”, Journal of Urban Economics 79, 20-38.
Moretti, E. and D. J. Wilson (2017), “The Effect of State Taxes on the Geographic Location of Top Earners: Evidence from Star Scientists”, American Economic Review 107, 1858-1903.
- Mukherjee et al. (2017) use firm-level data to study the effect of a gradual change in corporate taxation between 1990 and 2006 in the US Their results are consistent with those of Akcigit et al. (2018). In particular, they show that higher corporate taxes negatively affect innovation inputs, outputs, and outcomes of private sector companies. Specifically, companies for which the corporate tax was increased reduce their R&D expenditures by about 4.3 percent, file about one fewer patent, record about 14.2 percent fewer patent citations in the two years following the tax increase, and register about 5.1 percent fewer new products in the year following the tax increase.
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Mukherjee, A., M. Singh and A. Žaldokas (2017), “Do Corporate Taxes Hinder Innovation?”, Journal of Financial Economics 124, 195-221.
- OUTPUT-BASED R&D TAX CREDIT SCHEMES Three papers analyze the causal effect of output -based tax credit schemes on private sector R&D activities. Bornemann et al. (2020) examine the introduction of a patent box system in Belgium in 2008 and compare R&D activities from Belgian companies that benefited from the tax credits with companies from Germany, France, and Sweden. The authors consider four different outcomes: patent applications, patent grants, patent quality (measured by citations), and the number of R&D workers in the researching companies. Their analysis shows that the number of patent applications and grants increased after the tax reform in Belgium, while the quality of patents decreased. The number of R&D workers, in turn, almost doubled.
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Rao, N. (2016), “Do Tax Credits Stimulate R&D Spending? The Effect of the R&D Tax Credit in Its First Decade”, Journal of Public Economics 140, 1-12.
- Schwab, T. and M. Todtenhaupt (2019), “Thinking Outside the Box: The Cross-Border Effect of Tax Cuts on R&D”, WU International Taxation Research Paper Series 2016-07, 16-073.
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Shao, Y. and C. Xiao (2019), “Corporate Tax Policy and Heterogeneous Firm Innova-tion: Evidence from a Developing Country”, Journal of Comparative Economics 47, 470-486.
- The authors investigate whether patent boxes lead to intra-firm profit shifts of multinational enterprises (MNEs) across national borders. Their study reinforces what Schwab and Todtenhaupt (2019) also show: locations of MNEs where patent boxes exist report on average 8.5 percent higher profits than the same MNE locations where patent boxes do not exist. GENERAL R&D TAX CREDIT SCHEMES Ten studies examine the effect of general R&D tax credit schemes, eight of which analyze the impact of corporate taxation; of these, three examine the impact of income taxation on private sector R&D activities.
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- The authors show that the reform was followed by 64 EconPol Forum 4 / 2023 July Volume 24 ECONOMIC POLICY AND ITS IMPACT 17 percent higher R&D expenditures among the newly eligible companies.
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- The most comprehensive study comes from Akcigit et al. (2018), whose data cover taxation and innovation in the US over the entire 20th century. The authors show that higher corporate taxation reduces US companies’ R&D activities in terms of the absolute number of R&D workers as well as both the quality and quantity of patents issued by companies.
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- Three of the fifteen evaluation studies on input -based R&D tax credit schemes examine the impact of US incremental tax credit schemes, using firm-level microdata. The first one, Berger (1993), studies the effect of such a scheme introduced in the US in 1981 and documents a positive effect on the R&D expenditures.
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