Essays On Corporate Taxation And The Firm PDF Download

My dissertation comprises of three essays in the field of public economics. The first essay investigates the employment effects of corporate taxation at the industry level; Specifically, do corporate taxes affect employment rates at the industry level and are the effects consistent across industries? This paper uses an identification strategy that exploits variation in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states and tries to understand how they impact industry employment at the county level with contiguous counties straddling state borders acting as controls. The results show that any change in the corporate tax rate affect the employment rate in goods producing sectors, but employment rate within the service sectors is only affected by an increase, and not decreases, in the corporate tax rates.The second essay is the first of its kind using the same variation in state corporate tax rates to investigate if they have any explanatory power in predicting variations in CEO pay. Specifically, this paper allows us to shed light on whether corporate tax cuts boost CEO pay? This paper, by using a difference-in-difference (DID) set up over the period 1994 to 2015, finds that corporate tax cuts statistically affect CEO pay among all publicly traded firms in the U.S. The magnitude of the effect increases among the S&P 500, S&P 100 and some tax avoiding firms. The paper further presents some interesting findings using three different measures of executive compensation.Lastly, the third essay empirically investigates whether the variation in state corporate tax rates across the US economy has any explanatory power in predicting variations in research and development expenditure across firms. The paper uses an identification strategy that exploits variation in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states and tries to understand how it impacts firm level R&D activity by using a difference-in-difference set up. Compustat data for all U.S. firms over the period starting from 1994 to 2014 are used to test this hypothesis. The results suggest that corporate tax cuts does not affect R&D expenditures among all publicly traded firms in the U.S. while an increase in the tax rate leads to a decrease in R&D spending.