The Corporate Tax Burden: Facts and Fiction

Publication selectivity in favor of reporting growth-enhancing effects of corporate tax cuts explains most of the evidence supporting the growth impact of corporate tax cuts, "...The empirical literature on the impact of corporate taxes on economic growth reaches ambiguous conclusions: corporate tax cuts increase, reduce, or do not significantly affect growth. We apply meta-regression methods to a novel data set with 441 estimates from 42 primary studies. There is evidence for publication selectivity in favour of reporting growth-enhancing effects of corporate tax cuts. Correcting for this bias, we cannot reject the hypothesis of a zero effect of corporate taxes on growth. Several factors influence reported estimates, including researcher choices concerning the measurement of growth and corporate taxes, and controlling for other budgetary components. The unweighted sample mean of all standardised coefficients amounts to −0.02. Fig. 2, however, reveals that there is considerable dispersion in the results: the minimum standardised coefficient is −0.29 and the maximum is 0.16; the standard deviation is 0.08. The funnel has a familiar shape, often found in the literature: the most precise estimates, which can be seen at the top of the funnel plot, are close to the vertical zero effect line. Moreover, the bottom of the funnel is somewhat asymmetric with a stronger mass of imprecise estimates located on the left side (representing the common-sense growth-enhancing effects of corporate tax cuts), which could be an indication for publication selection bias...."

Sebastian Gecherta and Philipp Heimberger, "Do corporate tax cuts boost economic growth?"European Economic Review, August 2022, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292122000885

Kyle Pomerleau on American corporations tax burden relative to peer economies, "...This report compares the tax burden on corporations in the United States under current law to the corporate tax burdens of 36 OECD member nations.7 It also considers two leading proposals to reform US corporate income taxation and several alternative policies. Each option is evaluated using three metrics: the statutory corporate income tax rate, the corporate marginal effective tax rate (METR), and the corporate average effective tax rate (AETR)...."

Overall snapshot:

The Statutory Corporate Income Tax Rate, "...Currently, the average value (weighted by gross domestic product) of the combined statutory corporate income tax rate in the OECD is 26 percent. (All references to averages in this report denote gross domestic product-weighted averages.) Combined statutory tax rates range from 9 percent in Hungary to 35 percent in Colombia. Approximately half of OECD countries (19 of 37 member nations surveyed) have combined corporate tax rates between 20 and 25 percent. Only six countries have statutory corporate tax rates below 20 percent. The United States’ combined statutory corporate tax rate of 25.8 percent is 0.2 percentage points below the OECD average and lower than the rate for one-third of OECD members. If the US federal corporate income tax rate is increased to 28 percent, as in Biden’s proposal, the United States would have the second highest combined statutory corporate tax rate in the OECD, at 32.3 percent. The House proposal, which would raise the federal tax rate to 26.5 percent, would increase the United States’ combined statutory corporate tax rate to 30.9 percent, which would be among the highest in the OECD, but still below Portugal and Colombia (Figure 2)..."

The Marginal Effective Tax Rate,"...METRs on corporate investment are lower than statutory tax rates in the OECD. The average METR in the OECD is 15.5 percent. Given the large differences in corporate tax bases, the range of marginal tax rates is greater than the range of statutory corporate tax rates. METRs range from -33.5 percent in Portugal to 23.9 percent in Colombia (Figure 3).The METR on corporate investment in the United States under current law is 18.3 percent, 2.8 percentage points higher than the OECD average. The relatively high METR in the United States is driven by less generous depreciation allowances than in other OECD countries. Recall that the calculations assume that the slated expiration of 100 percent bonus depreciation has occurred and that the slated introduction of amortization of R&D costs has taken effect. Those assumptions raise the tax burden on equipment and R&D..."

Hassett/Mathur concluded that a 1% rise in the corporate-tax rate is associated with a 0.5% drop in wages which implies that more than 100% of the burden of corporate tax lands on workers.

Core of paper, "...To summarize, our results indicate that corporate taxes are significantly related to wage rates across countries. Our coefficient estimates suggest that a 1 percent increase in corporate tax rates leads to a 0.5 percent decrease in wage rates. These results also hold for effective marginal and average tax rates. The coefficient estimate is (on average) close to 0.5. This suggests that wages are as likely to be influenced by the top statutory corporate tax rate, as by the effective marginal and average tax rates. Hence corporate tax cuts in the form of large allowances for depreciation of equipment and structures which reduce effective marginal rates could effectively influence wage levels as well. We find evidence that international corporate tax rates affect domestic wages. Capital formation and therefore wage rates are affected not only by domestic tax rates, but also tax rates in competing economies. The coefficient estimates for the spatial tax variables range from 0.6 to 1.4 suggesting significant quantitative impacts. Comparing different weighting schemes, the effects are largest when “neighbors” are defined as countries within the same income group, rather than within the same region. This suggests that tax competition is most intense among, say, high income countries such as Canada, France and Italy, rather than between geographic neighbors. This makes sense intuitively since there do not appear to be large transport costs associated with moving capital across large distances, so capital can easily flow to the most remunerative locations….”
Evidence, "…Table 1 provides summary statistics for our data. The average dollar wage over our sample period for all countries was approximately $5.2 per hour, while the average headline corporate tax rate was 34 percent. The effective average rate was lower at 30 percent, and the effective marginal rate was nearly 10 percentage points lower at 26.5 percent. In general average wages have increased between 1981 and 2005 from $3.5 to $9. per hour, while average tax rates have declined substantially. In 1981, the average top rate was 42 percent. In 2005, the average rate was 25 percent....Table 5 presents various tests of our hypothesis. In specification (1), we use a five year (log) average of the capital-labor ratio as the dependent variable. We find that all measures of corporate taxation, such as the top national corporate tax rate, the effective average and the effective marginal tax rate negatively affect capital formation, though only the first two measures show up as significant. The coefficient on (Log) Top Corporate Tax Rate implies a value of the elasticity of close to -0.14. Clearly, higher top rates discourage capital formation. This result is even stronger for effective average tax rates which take into account depreciation allowances, inflation and interest rates and other factors that affect capital formation through the user cost of capital (specification 2). The estimated elasticity in this case is close to (negative) 0.16. Other studies, using micro data and the actual user cost (not only the tax rate) estimate elasticities that are higher than this. Balistreri, McDaniel and Wong (2002) using industry data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimate elasticities in the range of 1-1.22, using different weighting schemes. Leung and Yuen (2005) using industry-level data on Canadian manufacturing estimate an elasticity of 0.33. While our coefficient estimate is likely to be heavily biased due to aggregation, measurement issues and data constraints (the capital-labor ratio is not specific to the manufacturing sector), we present these results simply to show that different measures of corporate taxation can significantly and negatively affect capital-labor ratios. In column (4), we test to see if spatial tax rates have any effect on domestic capital labor ratios. Our results indicate that both domestic and neighbor country tax rates are important in explaining the formation of domestic capital labor ratios. Higher tax rates in neighboring countries have a positive and significant effect on capital formation in the domestic country, which supports our hypothesis that capital flows out of high tax jurisdictions and to low tax jurisdiction. The final column, Column (5), studies the link between high capital-labor ratios and average wages. Since capital-labor ratios are a direct proxy for worker productivity, it is not surprising that higher capital-labor ratios are associated with significantly higher wages. In general, a 1 percent increase in the capital-labor ratios is associated w..ith a 0.45 percent increase in wages….”

Kevin Hassett and Aparna Mathur, "A spatial model of corporate tax incidence," Applied Economics, 2015, https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/a-spatial-model-of-corporate-tax-incidence/

Kimberly Clausing argues there isn’t evidence to support the idea that the corporate tax falls on workers, her takeaway, ".... workers have thus far remained insulated from their countries’ corporate tax policies. While prior work had identified burdens on workers from high corporate tax rates, a careful literature review reveals that this work suffers from essential drawbacks. Together with new evidence from the present analysis and also in Clausing (2012), one is left with a discrepancy between the theoretical expectation that workers will bear a large share of the corporate tax burden in a global economy and the empirical reality that there is very little robust evidence linking corporate tax rates and wages. There are several potential solutions to this puzzle. One can conclude that the data are simply too coarse to robustly pick up these theoretical mechanisms, or one can conclude that the theory itself is not an adequate depiction of reality and misses features of corporate taxation and competition that are important for understanding corporate tax incidence. It is also important to note two ways in which globalization itself may undermine the open-economy general equilibrium tax incidence result. First, if corporations are mere intermediaries in global capital markets in which a wide assortment of investors with different tax treatments invest, tax policy changes could affect the ownership and financing patterns of assets more than they affect the aggregate level of investment in different countries. Second, since multinational firms have become increasingly adept at separating the reporting of income from the true location of the underlying economic activities, international tax avoidance itself comes with a silver lining. Mobile firms move profits without needing to substantially alter the underlying investments, whereas immobile firms do not respond like the open-economy actors of modern corporate tax incidence models. In both cases, workers in high-tax countries are relatively insulated from adverse wage effects due to capital reallocation toward low-tax countries. The insights of this paper generate several policy-relevant considerations. First, there is already a strong case for rate-lowering, base-broadening corporate tax reforms. Any possible adverse effects on workers from high corporate tax rates just make that case stronger. Second, international tax reforms need to pay particular attention to tradeoffs that come from competing policy goals. Territorial systems of taxation would both heighten tax sensitivity of real investments to tax differences among countries and also (likely) widen the escape valve of income shifting out of high-tax country jurisdictions; a truly “tough” territorial system would predominantly have the former effect. On the other hand, limits on deferral, when combined with a lower rate, reduce incentives to move both real investments and income abroad. Finally, a formulary apportionment approach, while curbing the tax sensitivity of income reporting, would need to be designed carefully in order to avoid heightening real responses to tax differences among countries, since real responses generate greater concern about adverse effects on labor..."

Kimberly Clausing, "Who Pays The Corporate Tax In A Global Economy,"National Tax Journal, March 2013, https://www.ntanet.org/NTJ/66/1/ntj-v66n01p151-84-who-pays-corporate-tax.pdf

How labor avoids tax, “…The first possibility to recognize is that the open-economy general equilibrium corporate tax mechanism that lies at the heart of the prediction that labor will bear a large share of the corporate tax burden is difficult to identify with real world data. We are limited to a universe of about 30 comparably affluent countries with about 30 years of data of sufficient quality and comparability. Even with the large variation in corporate tax policies by countries over this time period, there remain many confounding influences on the data. It is indeed possible that corporate taxes have negative effects on wages that our data are simply too coarse to detect…As noted above, the labor share would be lower if trade substitution elasticities were lower, or if other parameters are taken at their median values, according to Gravelle (2013). But even beyond these modifications, the Harberger-style model neglects several features of real-world corporate taxation that are likely to have consequences for incidence. First, as Gravelle and Hungerford (2011) note, since the current corporate tax has residence elements, that would cause it to fall more heavily on capital than the above models imply. Second, if the corporate tax in fact subsidizes debt-financed investments (due to interest payment deductibility and accelerated depreciation), then raising the corporate tax could actually cause capital inflows of debt-financed investments. This would also reduce negative impacts on workers.. Considering the corporate tax as a tax on pure economic profit, or rents, alters the efficiency implications of the tax, as the tax has smaller effects on factor use choices if it falls primarily on pure profits rather than on corporate capital. This consideration also affects the policy implications of the tax. For example, if the rent-sharing mechanism is key, then cuts to the corporate tax will allow more rents to fall into the hands of shareholders and workers, who will share the excess returns. However, since labor markets are integrated across firms and industries, workers will eventually move from job to job and industry-to-industry, eroding wage differences. Thus, the economy-wide wage effects from such rent-sharing may be smaller than the rent-sharing specifications alone would lead one to believe…One possibility is that clientele effects may be important. Desai and Dharmapala (2009) find evidence of substitution between foreign portfolio investment and foreign direct investment in response to tax incentives. Also, as noted above, corporate taxation may actually subsidize debt-financed investments…. This divergence could reduce the wage effects of relative corporate tax rates,since internationally agile firms can move income without commensurate movements of investment and jobs. Indeed, many of the most global companies have become increasingly adept at the creation of stateless income, as discussed in Kleinbard (2011). If firms can respond to tax differences among countries through financial or organizational decisions, this will lower the tax sensitivity of real activity, thus reducing adverse effects on labor associated from tax-induced reductions in the capital stock…”

More evidence, “…Table 5 shows results for the same VAR analysis, using relative tax rates instead of level tax rates. Again, these relative tax variables were calculated as the country tax variable minus the OECD average for the same tax variable. Results were little changed; in all but one case the tax variables were jointly statistically insignificant. In the statistically significant case, the impulse response function shows that the six-year effect of taxes on wages was small and negative. Given the known sensitivity of VAR analysis to the number of lags and variables included, I also experimented with other specifications. For example, I considered a model with ten lags for both level and relative tax rates. Table 6 shows the results for the relative tax term specifications; the level tax rate results were nearly identical. Of the four VAR systems, in three cases there was no evidence of a jointly statistically significant relationship between lagged values of the corporate tax variables and wages. In the other case, the impulse response function indicates an approximately zero net relationship…”

Evidence, “…Figures 3 and 4 show scatter plots examining simple correlations between the BLS data hourly wage growth over three decades (the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s) and the corresponding relative corporate income tax rates. Figure 3 shows the average relative statutory tax rate of each country in comparison to the rest of the countries in the sample over the same decade. Figure 4 is identical except it considers decade-long averages of the relative effective tax rate. In both cases, the figures do not show clear empirical relationships between wage growth and average relative tax rates over the three most recent decades. Figures 5 and 6 show the same types of simple scatter plots; the only difference is that the use of the OECD annual wage data, which constrains the sample to two decade averages, the 1990s and the 2000s. While there seems to be some evidence of a negative relationship between annual wage growth over these two decades and decade-average relative statutory tax rates in Figure 5, that relationship is less apparent in Figure 6, which shows relative effective tax rates. The correlations between the variables in Figures 3, 4, 5, and 6 are -0.07, +0.07, -0.47, and -0.09. The largest coefficient implies that about 22 percent of the variation in wage growth is explained by variation in relative tax rate; the other three coefficients imply that the variables are not well correlated…”