Abstract

This article 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 patented 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 other economic outcomes. Our analysis focuses on the effect 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 affect 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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二十世纪的税收与创新*

摘要

本文研究了 20 世纪美国公司税和个人税对创新的影响。我们建立了一个由自 1920 年以来获得专利的发明人组成的小组，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，并考虑创新的数量和质量、其位置以及公司而不是创新的份额。非公司部门。我们提出了几种识别策略，所有这些策略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地点产生负面影响，但不会影响平均创新质量。州级税收弹性很大，并且与个人层面对创新产生的反应和跨州流动性的汇总一致。公司税往往特别影响公司发明者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。