1、中文 3180 字， 2018 单词 Source: Donald Bruce .John Deskins,2010 “Can state tax policies be used to promote entrepreneurial activity?”.Springer ScienceBusiness Media, LLC. January.pp.99-110 原文 : Can state tax policies be used to promote entrepreneurial activity? Abstract Despite a recent flurry of empiric
2、al research on the effects of taxes on small business activity, state-level taxes faced by entrepreneurs have been overlooked by most of the existing literature. Using a 50-state panel of tax policy information spanning the years 1989 through 2002, our analysis reveals that state tax policies genera
3、lly do not appear to have quantitatively important effects on entrepreneurial activity. When we find statistically important effects, we find that higher individual income tax rates, the existence of a state-level estate, inheritance or gift tax, and a higher weight on the sales factor in the state
4、corporate income tax apportionment formula all slightly reduce a states share of the national entrepreneurial stock. Results also indicate that states with more progressive personal income tax structures and states that have more aggressive corporate income taxes through the imposition of a combined
5、 reporting requirement both tend to have slightly higher entrepreneurship rates. The composition of state tax portfolios is not found to be a significant determinant of state entrepreneurship. 1 Introduction The interplay between tax policy and entrepreneurial activity has enjoyed a resurgence in th
6、e empirical economics literature. Most of the recent research has focused on federal taxes, however, leaving state tax policies relatively unexplored. As states continue to grapple with difficult issues in business taxation and development incentives, a thorough consideration of the effects of state
7、 tax policies on entrepreneurial activity becomes even more important, especially when considering the possible benefits that could follow new entrepreneurial ventures through economic growth, innovation, and the like. In this report, we examine the relationships between state tax policy and entrepr
8、eneurship using a longitudinal database of detailed information on state tax policies for all 50 US states from 1989 through 2002. This investigation is warranted for a number of reasons. First, as a result of the focus on federal taxes, earlier research has only considered a subset of the taxes fac
9、ing small businesses. For example, Cline et al. 2006 show that the total state and local tax burden for US businesses includes much more than direct business taxes such as corporate income taxes or state franchise, excise, or gross receipts taxes. Businessesespecially small businessesalso pay signif
10、icant amounts of property and sales taxes, along with a growing menu of miscellaneous charges and fees. The existing array of state tax structures provides a virtual cornucopia of exogenous policy variation that can be used to cleanly identify entrepreneurial responses. A second motivation for our s
11、tudy is the observation that state governments continue to debate and enact the bulk of pro-entrepreneurship policy in the US without the benefit of hard data on the effects of those policies on small business development and success. On one hand, higher taxes might reduce entrepreneurial activity b
12、y lowering the returns. On the other hand, higher taxes increase the rewards from tax avoidance or evasion and thus might have the undesirable effect of increasing entrepreneurial activity. These two impacts might also offset each other, such that higher taxes have no noticeable impact on entreprene
13、urial activity. The extent to which tax policiesespecially state tax policiesactually influence entrepreneurial activity requires empirical exploration. If taxes do not affect entrepreneurial activity i.e., if the returns and avoidance effects are either both small or cancel each other out , using t
14、ax policy to encourage innovation or growth through entrepreneurship is not likely to be fruitful. Alternatively, if a nonzero effect can be determined, the actual parameter estimates can be used to more efficiently design tax policy to achieve desired changes in entrepreneurship. As stated above, o
15、ur paper is one of only a few to investigate the relationship between state tax policy and entrepreneurship, as the large majority of the literature has focused on federal policy. We extend their line of analysis in the following general ways, all of which are discussed in detail below: 1. we consid
16、er a broader array of state tax policy variables, 2. we consider an additional measure of entrepreneurial activity drawn from tax return data, 3. we consider not only the stock of entrepreneurship in a state, but also a states share of national entrepreneurship in order to address location effects,
17、4. we consider not only tax rates but also tax shares in state tax portfolios, 5. we consider effective tax rates as a robustness check on our baseline analysis of statutory tax rates, 6. we consider agricultural entrepreneurship in another robustness check, and 7. we analyze a longer time period. 2
18、 Existing literature Two broad areas of study in the earlier literature motivate this analysis. The first is the literature on the effects of state tax policies on business location decisions. These results are important because business location decisions can have important impacts on measured entr
19、epreneurship or self-employment rates. In his oft-cited review of a vast array of empirical studies, Wasylenko 1997 concludes that taxes have statistically significant but quantitatively small effects on interregional location behavior. In a similar vein, Bartik 1991 concludes that higher state and
20、local taxes reduce business activity in a region with an elasticity of about -0.3, while noting significant deviation from this average across studies.3 However, this literature may be slightly less relevant to the present study because of its focus on location decisions among firms. If smaller busi
21、nesses are less mobile than larger firms and they might not be , they are perhaps less likely to respond to state differences in tax policies. Further, most state development incentives are targeted at larger manufacturing firms rather than small businesses. The second broad area of relevant literat
22、ure consists of empirical studies of taxation and entrepreneurship. The number of studies in this literature has grown significantly in recent years, largely due to greater availability of useful data. Time series studies have focused on federal tax policies and have generally concluded that higher
23、federal income or payroll tax rates cause higher rates of entrepreneurship, specifically defined as self-employment Long1982； Blau 1987； Parker 1996； Cowling and Mitchell 1997； Robson 1998 . Explanations often rest on the idea that high tax rates drive workers out of paid employment, or wage jobs, i
24、nto entrepreneurial ventures where they can more easily avoid or evade taxes. Despite the consistency of the larger group of times series studies, a more recent and extensive time series analysis in this area by Bruce and Mohsin 2006 shows that the question of how taxes affect entrepreneurship is no
25、t yet settled. In addition to personal income and payroll taxes, Bruce and Mohsin consider corporate income taxes, capital gains taxes and estate taxes. Results generally indicate that taxes have statistically significant but very small and scattered effects on entrepreneurship rates. Consequently,
26、they are likely to be ineffective in generating desired changes in entrepreneurial activity. None of these studies consider the effects of state taxes. Several other studies have examined cross-sectional or panel micro data to examine the influence of tax policies on individual decisions about entre
27、preneurship. Results from these studies have also been inconclusive Bruce and Gurley 2005； Bruce 2000, 2002； Carroll et al. 2001； Gentry and Hubbard 2000； Moore 2003； Schuetze2000 . While some of these have indicated that higher tax rates on self-employment income have ambiguous effects on self-empl
28、oyment rates, a growing consensus suggests that tax rate increases reduce entrepreneurial entry, growth, hiring, investment, and survival. State taxes have been considered in only a portion of these studies, however, and then only as a component of a combined federal and state income tax rate. A few
29、 studies have analyzed state-level time series or panel data to explicitly examine the effects of state tax policies on entrepreneurial activity and are therefore most relevant to the current paper. Carlton 1979 finds no strong evidence that local taxes influence the number of firm births. He uses r
30、ather rough proxies for tax variables, however, and only considers three industries for a limited time period. Bartik 1989 uses more detailed tax information and a broader array of industries and finds that higher property taxes, corporate taxes, and sales taxes on equipment negatively impact small
31、business startups.4 He also finds that personal income taxes and general sales taxes are not statistically significant, while government spending has mixed effects depending on the category of spending. His survey of earlier studies finds elasticities that are generally below 0.5 in absolute value.
32、Chen and Williams 1999 examine business failure rates from 1984 through 1993, estimating panel regressions for each of a number of industry categories. Although their focus is not exclusively on small businesses, they find that higher sales taxes per capita increase business failure rates for low-te
33、ch industries, while higher corporate income taxes per capita lead to lower failure rates for high-tech industries. Kreft and Sobel 2003 find that the existence of state inheritance taxes above the federal level is associated with lower rates of growth in the number of sole proprietors between 1996
34、and 2000. 3 Data and empirical methodology A common criticism of virtually all measures of entrepreneurial or small business activity is that they include part-time and so-called partial entrepreneurs. No consensus has arisen about how to address this, or even what the consequences might be for empi
35、rical research.9 Further, for virtually any measure of entrepreneurship for which data are available, there are questions about the extent to which it actually measures what one might consider to be true entrepreneurship. Rather than focusing on a single measure or claiming that either or both of ou
36、rs are better than other available measures then, we simply present parallel treatments of two alternatives in order gauge sensitivity of our results to the definition of entrepreneurship. In the analysis that follows, these two entrepreneurial measures are each viewed in two distinct ways. In our b
37、aseline specifications, we enter the state-specific entrepreneurship rates directly as described above. These values represent the stock of entrepreneurship in a state, as described above, and most closely relate to the self-employment rates used in much of the prior literature. With this approach o
38、ur focus is more heavily toward the within-state effects of tax policy instead of on the cross-state locations effects of tax policy on entrepreneurship. As our primary focus is on the effects of tax policy on the tendency to start and maintain a small business, this approach is particularly useful because many entrepreneurs are involved only in smaller operations that do not span state boundaries. 4 Conclusions
