Optimal Taxation and R&D Policies
研究了企业研发生产率不可观测且存在技术溢出时，如何设计最优的公司税和研发补贴政策，发现简单的非线性补贴就能接近最优效果。
We study the optimal design of corporate taxation and R&D policies as a dynamic mechanism design problem with spillovers. Firms have heterogeneous research productivity, and that research productivity is private information. There are non‐internalized technological spillovers across firms, but the asymmetric information prevents the government from correcting them in the first best way. We highlight that key parameters for the optimal policies are (i) the relative complementarities between observable R&D investments, unobservable R&D inputs, and firm research productivity, (ii) the dispersion and persistence of firms' research productivities, and (iii) the magnitude of technological spillovers across firms. We estimate our model using firm‐level data matched to patent data and quantify the optimal policies. In the data, high research productivity firms get disproportionately higher returns to R&D investments than lower productivity firms. Very simple innovation policies, such as linear corporate taxes combined with a nonlinear R&D subsidy—which provides lower marginal subsidies at higher R&D levels—can do almost as well as the unrestricted optimal policies. Our formulas and theoretical and numerical methods are more broadly applicable to the provision of firm incentives in dynamic settings with asymmetric information and spillovers, and to firm taxation more generally.