Consumption Taxes and Corporate Investment
利用准自然实验和跨国面板数据，发现消费税会减少企业投资，需求弹性越大的企业投资下降越多，其机制是降低企业盈利和总消费，且影响幅度与企业税相当。
Abstract Consumers nominally pay the consumption tax, but theoretical and empirical evidence is mixed on whether corporations partly shoulder this burden, thereby affecting corporate investment. Using a quasi-natural experiment, we show that consumption taxes decrease investment. Firms facing more elastic demand decrease investment more strongly, because they bear more of the consumption tax. We corroborate the validity of our findings using 86 consumption tax changes in a cross-country panel. We document two mechanisms underlying the investment response: reduced firms’ profitability and lower aggregate consumption. Importantly, the magnitude of the investment response to consumption taxes is similar to that of corporate taxes. Received September 25, 2017; editorial decision August 26, 2018 by Editor Wei Jiang. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.