Search Results
Journal Article
State business taxes and investment: state-by-state simulations
This article develops a framework for simulating the effects of state business taxes on state investment and output. Our simulations provide the predicted increase in investmentboth in equipment and structures (E&S) and in research and development (R&D)and the predicted increase in output for a given state resulting from a specified change in one of its three tax policiesthe E&S investment tax credit, the R&D tax credit, or the corporate income tax. The simulations depend on a set of formulas linking economic parameters and state data to investment and output, all of which are reported in ...
Conference Paper
A framework for assessing depository institution risk
Working Paper
A State Level Database for the Manufacturing Sector: Construction and Sources
This document describes the construction of and data sources for a state-level panel data set measuring output and factor use for the manufacturing sector. These data are a subset of a larger, comprehensive data set that we currently are constructing and hope to post on the FRBSF website in the near future. The comprehensive data set will cover the U.S. manufacturing sector and may be thought of as a state-level analog to other widely used productivity data sets such as the industry-level NBER Productivity Database or Dale Jorgenson’s “KLEM” database or the country-level Penn World ...
Working Paper
State Investment Tax Incentives: What Are the Facts?
There is an ongoing debate in the U.S. among policymakers and the courts concerning the practical effects of state investment tax incentives. However, this debate often suffers from a lack of clear information on the extent of such incentives among states and how these incentives have evolved over time. This paper takes a first step toward addressing this shortcoming. Compiling information from all 50 states and the District of Columbia over the past 40 years, we are able to paint a picture of the variation in state investment tax incentives across states and over time. In particular, we ...
Working Paper
Tax Competition among U.S. States: Racing to the Bottom or Riding on a Seesaw?
Dramatic declines in capital tax rates among U.S. states and European countries have been linked by many commentators to tax competition, an inevitable “race to the bottom,” and underprovision of local public goods. This paper analyzes the reaction of capital tax policy in a given U.S. state to changes in capital tax policy by other states. Our study is undertaken with a novel panel data set covering the 48 contiguous U.S. states for the period 1965 to 2006 and is guided by the theory of strategic tax competition. The latter suggests that capital tax policy is a function of “foreign” ...
Working Paper
State Investment Tax Incentives: A Zero-Sum Game?
Over the past four decades, state investment tax incentives have proliferated. This emergence of state investment tax credits (ITC) and other investment tax incentives raises two important questions: 1) Are these tax incentives effective in achieving their stated objective, to increase investment within the state?; 2) To the extent these incentives raise investment within the state, how much of this increase is due to investment drawn away from other states? To begin to answer these questions, we construct a detailed panel dataset for 48 states for 20+ years. The dataset contains series on ...
Working Paper
Can Lower Tax Rates Be Bought? Business Rent-Seeking and Tax Competition Among U.S. States
The standard model of strategic tax competition – the non-cooperative tax-setting behavior of jurisdictions competing for a mobile capital tax base – assumes that government policymakers are perfectly benevolent, acting solely to maximize the utility of the representative resident in their jurisdiction. We depart from this assumption by allowing for the possibility that policymakers also may be influenced by the rent-seeking (lobbying) behavior of businesses. Businesses recognize the factors affecting policymakers’ welfare and may make campaign contributions to influence tax policy. ...
Working Paper
Job creation tax credits and job growth: whether, when, and where?
This paper studies the effects of Job Creation Tax Credits (JCTCs) enacted by U.S. states over the past 20 years. First, we investigate whether JCTCs stimulate within-state job growth. Second, we assess from where any increased employment comes from ? in-state or out-of-state? Third, we evaluate when JCTCs' effects occur. In particular, we test for negative anticipation effects between JCTC enactment and when legislation goes into effect. We investigate these questions using a difference-in-differences estimator applied to monthly panel data on employment, the JCTC value, the JCTC effective ...
Working Paper
Fiscal Foresight and Perverse Distortions to Firm Behavior: Anticipatory Dips and Compensating Rebounds
We study the conditions under which fiscal foresight – forward-looking agents anticipating future policy changes – results in perverse economic behavior through unintended intertemporal tradeoffs. Somewhat surprisingly, fiscal foresight by itself is far from sufficient for policy-induced incentives to perversely distort firm behavior. Rather, we show that there are two additional sets of conditions, at least one of which must hold to generate perverse behavior: (i) storable output, diminishing returns, and a non- competitive output market; (ii) “rolling base” policy design and ...
Working Paper
Fiscal Policies for Job Creation and Innovation: The Experiences of US States
This paper reviews selected fiscal policy initiatives undertaken by US states to encourage job creation and innovation. We begin with a discussion of some general considerations about the design of tax policies summarized in a tax policy design table. Four policies are reviewed: job creation tax credits, research and development tax credits, a set of tax policies targeted to the biotechnology industry, and a broad set of tax policies that attract star scientists. The experiences at the state level are used to evaluate the effectiveness of these employment and knowledge-capital tax incentives ...