论文笔记 | The effect of tax avoidance crackdown on corporate innovation

Qin L A , Msm B , Ts C . The effect of tax avoidance crackdown on corporate innovation[J]. Journal of Accounting and Economics, 2020.

这篇文章利用DID，研究了美国各州陆续制定addback statutes来避免企业税收转移后，对企业创新的影响。

Addback statutes

1. To protect against the erosion of the state corporate income tax base (e.g., Borens and Kerner, 2013), more than 20 U.S. state governments have adopted addback provisions at different points in time.
2. Specifically, multistate firms are required to add back interest and intangible expenses paid to an out-of-state related party to the taxable income reported in the state income tax return.（阻止了公司利益利用无形资产使用的内部交易来进行税收管理）
3. 举个例子：
   
4. 虽然存在税收例外（subject-to-tax exception），如重复征税例外（a firm does not need to add back intangible expenses paid to a related party if the related party is subject to income tax in the state or another state）、非关联方交易例外（The transaction with the unrelated party must have a valid business purpose and/or use the arm’s length price）、证明其合理性（if the taxpayer can prove that the application of addback statutes is unreasonable. ） ，但是it is difficult for firms to meet these requirements

Hypothesis

Prior literature on the effect of tax policies on innovation can be summarized into two streams.
（1）The first stream of studies examines the effect of R&D tax credits and allowances on R&D investment

Bloom, N., Griffith, R., Van Reenen, J., 2002. Do R&D tax credits work? Evidence from a panel of countries 1979-1997. J. Publ. Econ. 85, 1-31

Hall, B.H., 1993. R&D tax policy during the 1980s: success or failure? Tax Pol. Econ. 7, 1-35.

Hines, J.R., Jaffe, A.B., 2000. International taxation and the location of inventive activity. In: Hines, J.R. (Ed.), International Taxation and Multinational Activity. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 201-230

Wilson, D., 2009. Beggar thy neighbor? The in-state, out-of-state, and aggregate effects of R&D tax credits. Rev. Econ. Stat. 91, 431-436

Rao, N., 2016. Do tax credits stimulate R&D spending? The effect of the R&D tax credit in its first decade. J. Publ. Econ. 140, 1-12

== (2)Another stream examines the effect of statutory tax rates on innovation==

Atanassov, J., Liu, X., 2019. Can corporate income tax cuts stimulate innovation? J. Financ. Quant. Anal. 55 (5), 1-51

Mukherjee, A., Singh, M., Zaldokas, A., 2017. Do corporate taxes hinder innovation? J. Financ. Econ. 124, 195-221.

Hypothesis. The adoption of addback statutes negatively affects corporate innovation.

Empirical Test

Our final sample includes 11,228 firm-year observations, which belong to 1946 unique firms.

Measurement：
（1）Identifying affected firms and observations，存在问题一些低创新企业会“自发”选择建立到states with the addback statutes（remove a firm if all its subsidiaries in states with the addback statutes are established after the adoption of the addback statutes in those states、require each affected firm to have observations both before and after being affected by the addback statutes）、存在一些高创新企业在政策实施之后，直接把所有子公司迁移到其他州、国外，导致结果夸大（remove observations of an affected firm that no longer has subsidiaries in states with the addback statutes after being affected by the addback statutes）

we set Addback to 1 for the adoption year and all the subsequent years, unless the firm no longer has any subsidiary in states with the addback statutes. If a firm has no subsidiaries in states with the addback statutes in a given year, Addback equals 0.

（2）Innovation：use patent count and citation count to
capture the amount and quality of innovation.（政策颁发三年后的对公司创新的影响）

model and baseline regression

the adoption of addback statutes significantly reduces the level of corporate innovation of affected firms, reflected in the 4.77 percentage point decrease in patent count and the 5.12 percentage point decrease in citation count.

Additional tests
（1）Economic importance of “disappearing patents”
研究的问题是 “disappearing patents”是仅作用于低质量的创新，还是高质量的创新也会受到影响。That is，The decline in the total number of patents may not necessarily indicate a negative consequence, if a firm mainly uses low-quality patents for tax-motivated income shifting. 然而如果高质量的创新也影响，说明“disappearing patents” resulting from the adoption of the addback statutes have significant economic value and do not seem to have lower quality than other patents

（2）The location of patents：the adoption of the addback statutes reduces firms’ incentives to strategically locate patents for the purpose of transfer pricing.

（3）The effect of financial constraints:alternative explanation for our findings is that crackdown on tax avoidance increases a firm’s financial constraints and thus reduces the level of investment in innovation activities （虽然是相同的结果，但是是不同的影响机制，本文认为是躲避税收，提升了创新的NPV，然而这里财务约束，反映的增加的税收，挤占了投资）

（4）State economic conditions and confounding events：内生性问题，同时期的税收政策抑制了创新、州的经济条件较差，产生两方面影响，不愿来投资和实施 Addback statutes。排除：移除样本、控制变量，logistics回归（Do State-level Economic Conditions Predict the Adoption of Addback Statutes）
（5）Are patents shifted to foreign countries? ：移除到其他国家，不会影响公司创新，只是把专利移到其他国家

（6）State corporate income tax revenue ： 提升则说明政策的有效性

（7）R&D tests: alter measurement of dependent variable

(8)Robustness tests

Conclusion