This paper studies the effect of corporate and personal taxes on innovation in the United States over the twentieth century. We build a panel of the universe of inventors who patent since 1920, and a historical state-level corporate tax database with corporate tax rates and tax base information, which we link to existing data on state-level personal income taxes and on other economic outcomes. Our analysis focuses on the impact of personal and corporate income taxes on individual inventors (the micro level) and on states (the macro level), considering the quantity and quality of innovation, its location, and the share produced by the corporate rather than the noncorporate sector. We propose several identification strategies, all of which yield consistent results. We find that higher taxes negatively impact the quantity and the location of innovation, but not average innovation quality. The state-level elasticities to taxes are large and consistent with the aggregation of the individual-level responses of innovation produced and cross-state mobility. Corporate taxes tend to especially affect corporate inventors’ innovation production and cross-state mobility. Personal income taxes significantly affect the quantity of innovation overall and the mobility of inventors.

中文翻译：

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20世纪的税收与创新

本文研究了公司税和个人税对 20 世纪美国创新的影响。我们建立了一个自 1920 年以来获得专利的发明人小组，以及一个包含公司税率和税基信息的历史州级公司税数据库，我们将其链接到有关州级个人所得税和其他经济成果的现有数据. 我们的分析侧重于个人和企业所得税对个人发明者（微观层面）和国家（宏观层面）的影响，考虑创新的数量和质量、创新的位置以及由企业而不是企业生产的份额。非企业部门。我们提出了几种识别策略，所有这些都会产生一致的结果。我们发现较高的税收会对创新的数量和位置产生负面影响，但不会对平均创新质量产生负面影响。州层面的税收弹性很大，并且与产生的创新和跨州流动的个人层面反应的聚合一致。公司税往往特别影响公司发明人的创新生产和跨州流动。个人所得税显着影响整体创新数量和发明人的流动性。