题目：Notching R&D Investment with Corporate Income Tax Cuts in China

时间：2017年12月8日 星期五 12:00 – 13:30

地点：明德主楼610

报告人：刘志阔

摘要：We analyze the effects of a large fiscal incentive for R&D investment in China that awards a lower average corporate income tax rate to qualifying firms. The sharp incentives of the program generate notches, or jumps, in firm values, and vary over time and across firm characteristics. We exploit a novel link between survey and administrative tax data of Chinese firms to estimate investment responses, the potential for evasion, as well as effects on productivity and tax payments. We find large responses of reported R&D using a cross sectional bunching estimators that is new in the R&D literature. We also find evidence that firms relabel administrative expenses as R&D to qualify for the program, and that up to 45% of the response may be due to relabeling. These effects imply user-cost-elasticities of 2 for the reported response, and 1.14 for the real response. Using the panel structure of the data, we estimate that the program increased firm productivity by 2.3% for targeted firms. Compared to the loss in tax revenue, it cost the government 4.8% of corporate tax revenue to raise productivity by 1%. These estimates are crucial ingredients for designing policies that trade-off corporate tax revenue with productivity growth.

报告人简介：刘志阔，经济学博士，现任上海财经大学中国公共财政研究院和公共经济与管理学院讲师，主要研究公共经济学和国际税收，已在《经济研究》等杂志发表多篇论文，并主持多项国家自然科学基金、国家税务总局咨询项目、上海市晨光计划等课题。