This article uses U.S. corporate tax return data to assess how government revenue would have changed if, over the period 1957–2013, corporations had been subject to a hypothetical corporate cash flow tax—that is, a tax allowing for the immediate deduction of investments in long‐lived assets like equipment and structures—rather than the corporate tax regime actually in effect. Holding taxpayer behavior fixed, the data indicate actual corporate tax revenue over the most recent period (1995–2013) differed little from that under the hypothetical cash flow tax. This result has three important implications. First, capital owners appear to bear a large fraction of the corporate tax today. This is because economic theory holds that corporate cash flow taxes are largely borne by capital owners and my result implies that the actual tax behaves in practice much like a cash flow tax. This theory is embodied in the Treasury's most recent model of corporate tax incidence. Applying the model to my results implies that only a small portion (2–10 percent) of the U.S. corporate tax was borne by labor in the years before the 2017 Act and thus capital providers are the primary beneficiaries of the Act's large corporate rate cut. Second, the results suggest that the United States could switch fully over to a cash flow tax, which is likely to be administratively simpler for both the government and corporations, at relatively low revenue cost. Third, the impact of fully switching to a cash flow tax on the operations of the real economy and its efficiency are likely to be fairly small. This is precisely because the corporate tax has already evolved to largely mimic a cash flow tax, and the article explores the reasons underlying this evolution using a novel dataset.

中文翻译：

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资本毕竟承担美国公司税吗？公司纳税申报单的新证据

本文使用美国公司的纳税申报表数据来评估如果在1957年至2013年期间公司受到假设的公司现金流量税（即允许立即扣除投资中的税款）的政府收入将如何变化。设备和结构之类的长期资产，而不是实际上生效的公司税制。在固定纳税人行为的情况下，数据表明最近一段时间（1995-2013年）的实际公司税收与假设现金流量税下的税收差异不大。该结果具有三个重要含义。首先，今天的资本所有者似乎承担了很大一部分公司税。这是因为经济学理论认为，公司现金流量税主要由资本所有者承担，而我的结果表明，实际税项在实践中的行为很像现金流量税。该理论体现在财政部最新的公司税发生率模型中。将模型应用于我的结果意味着，在《 2017年法案》之前的几年中，美国公司税中只有一小部分（2％至10％）由劳动者负担，因此，资本提供者是该法案大幅削减公司利率的主要受益者。其次，结果表明，美国可以完全转换为现金流税，这对于政府和公司而言，在行政上更简单，而且税收成本相对较低。第三，完全转换为现金流量税对实体经济的运作及其效率的影响可能很小。这恰好是因为公司税已经演变为在很大程度上模仿现金流量税，并且本文使用新颖的数据集探索了这种演变的基础。