Taxation and Innovation
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A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Akcigit, Ufuk; Stantcheva, Stefanie Article Taxation and innovation NBER Reporter Provided in Cooperation with: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Cambridge, Mass. Suggested Citation: Akcigit, Ufuk; Stantcheva, Stefanie (2018) : Taxation and innovation, NBER Reporter, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Cambridge, MA, Iss. 3, pp. 14-18 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/219421 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. 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In addi- fessor of economics with tenure at the most innovations also grew fastest tion, there is a question of whether University of Chicago and a research over the 100-year period from 1900 taxes influence where companies allo- associate at the NBER, where he is affil- to 2000.1 We also have documented cate R&D resources and how many iated with the Productivity, Innovation, that innovation is strongly associated researchers they employ. and Entrepreneurship program. He with social mobility. U.S. regions that Answers to these questions are also is affiliated with the Centre for experienced more innovation also still lacking, and there is a scarcity of Economic Policy Research. witnessed much stronger intergenera- empirical evidence. The gap in our Akcigit’s research focuses on eco- tional and social mobility, especially understanding is especially large when nomic growth, productivity, firm dynam- when innovations were attributable it comes to the effects of tax policy on ics, and the economics of innovation. His to new entrant firms. Innovation also technological development over the work aims to uncover the sources of tech- correlates strongly with top income long run. nological progress and innovation that inequality, but not so much with mea- serve as engines of long-run economic sures of inequality such as the Gini or Theory and Empirics of growth. He is also interested in the role the 90/10 ratio, and is associated with Taxation and Innovation of public policy in growth, with a focus greater well-being across the United on environmental regulations, public States.2,3 There are two complementary research and funding for universities, and Given all the important conse- dimensions along which to think industrial policies such as R&D tax cred- quences of innovation, it is essen- about the interplay between taxation its and corporate taxation. tial to understand how public poli- and innovation. First, taxation on per- Some of his current papers explore cies impact innovation in the United sonal or corporate income or wealth the impact of trade and foreign compe- States and across the world. Our joint may affect innovation. This may be tition on innovation, the role of politi- research agenda explores the interplay an unwelcome byproduct of taxes cal connections in reducing innovation, between taxation and innovation. that are set for completely unrelated and the social origins and family back- Major changes in U.S. tax policy, goals, such as to raise revenues. Thus, grounds of inventors. such as those in the Tax Cuts and Jobs reduced innovation could be one of His research has been published Act of 2017, raise questions about the efficiency costs of taxation; this in leading economics journals and has whether higher taxes stifle growth, could affect the assessment of optimal been supported by the Ewing Marion productivity, and innovation. taxes, since the elasticity of innova- Kauffman Foundation, the Alfred P. If innovation, like many other eco- tion with respect to taxes would influ- Sloan Foundation, and the National nomic outcomes, is the result of inten- ence the elasticities that enter into the Science Foundation. He is the recipi- tional effort and investment, then optimal tax formulas.4,5 This under- ent of a CAREER Award from the higher taxes will reduce the expected scores the importance of quantifying National Science Foundation. net return to these inputs and lead to the elasticity of innovation to taxa- Akcigit holds a BA in economics less innovation. Yet for at least some tion along all the relevant margins. from Koç University in Istanbul and path-breaking superstar inventors Second, tax policy could be designed a PhD in economics from MIT. Prior from history, such as Thomas Edison, intentionally so as not to hurt, or even to joining the University of Chicago Alexander Graham Bell, and Nikola to stimulate, innovation. in 2015, he was an assistant profes- Tesla, the picture that comes to mind Our research agenda on taxa- sor of economics at the University of is one of hard-working, enthusiastic tion and innovation seeks to under- Pennsylvania. scientists who are unconcerned with stand and quantify the effects of 14 NBER Reporter • No. 3, September 2018 taxation — of personal income, cor- the quantity of innovation, as cap- porate income, and wealth — on tured by the number of patents; the innovation by firms and individu- quality of innovation, as measured als. How do taxes shape all these by patent citations, and the share of agents’ choices leading up to innova- patents assigned to companies rather tions? Our empirical studies are based than individuals at both the state on modern-day data — European pat- level and individual-inventor level. ent office data since 1975, for exam- We also consider the location choices ple — and on long-run historical data, of firms and inventors, including such as the universe of U.S. inven- superstar inventors, as well as the cre- tors since 1836. Theoretically and ation of path-breaking, highly cited quantitatively, we study the design inventions. of decentralized innovation policies: We employ several identification combinations of taxes, tax credits, and strategies, and find consistent results Stefanie Stantcheva is a professor subsidies that can make agents inter- across the different approaches. First, of economics at Harvard University nalize the spillovers from innovations we control for state, year, and, at the and a research associate at the NBER, and foster innovation. We illustrate individual level, inventor-fixed effects, where she is affiliated with the Public our research approach by focusing on and include individual or state-level Economics and Political Economy pro- three distinct studies. time-varying controls in our specifi- grams. She is a research fellow at the cation. These go a long way toward Centre for Economic Policy Research. Taxation and Innovation absorbing unobserved heterogeneity. Stantcheva’s research focuses on the in the 20th Century In addition, we exploit tax schedule optimal design of tax systems and pub- differences across individuals within lic policies, taking into account labor Although the United States expe- a given state-year, due to tax progres- market features, complex social pref- rienced major changes in its tax code sivity, and compare individuals in dif- erences, and long-term effects such as throughout the 20th century, we cur- ferent tax brackets. Thus, we can also human capital acquisition and innova- rently do not know how these tax include state-times-year fixed effects tion by individuals and firms. Part of changes influenced innovation at to filter out other policy variations her work is centered around the study either the individual or corporate or confounding economic circum- of empirical effects of taxation of indi- level. This challenging question has stances. Second, at both the macro viduals and firms, on inequality, top largely gone unanswered because of and micro levels, we use an instru- incomes, migration, human capital, and a lack of long-run systematic data on mental variable strategy that consists innovation. innovation in the United States and of predicting the total tax burden fac- In recent work, she is exploring the the difficulty of identifying the effects ing a firm or inventor — a composite interplay between taxation and innova- of taxes. We leverage three new data- of state and federal taxes — with the tion using historical as well as modern- sets, which we constructed from his- changes in the federal tax rate only, day data and the optimal design of R&D torical data sources, to explore these holding the state taxes fixed at some policies. She is also studying how people issues.6 The datasets are a panel of the past level. This provides variation that form social preferences regarding redis- universe of U.S. inventors since 1920 is only driven by federal-level changes tribution, using large-scale online sur- and their associated patents, citations, and, thus, exogenous to any individual vey and experiment tools.