IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/1600.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Does the Tax System Favor Investment in High-Tech or Smoke-Stack Industries?

Author

Listed:
  • Don Fullerton
  • Andrew B. Lyon

Abstract

When tax rates vary by asset, a "hidden" industrial policy may aid industries that invest in a certain mix of assets. In this paper, we examine whether differential use of depreciable assets gives rise to differential tax treatment of high technology industries relative to other industries. First, we calculate the total effective tax rate on a marginal investment in each of 34 assets. Next, using these asset-specific tax rates and weighting by the use of these assets in each of 73 different industries, we calculate total effective tax rates at the industry level. We find considerable variation within the high-tech sector and within the more traditional sector, but for the case of a taxable firm with a given debt/equity ratio, we do not find any systematic differences between overall rates in the two sectors.

Suggested Citation

  • Don Fullerton & Andrew B. Lyon, 1985. "Does the Tax System Favor Investment in High-Tech or Smoke-Stack Industries?," NBER Working Papers 1600, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:1600
    Note: PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w1600.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Feldstein, Martin & Dicks-Mireaux, Louis & Poterba, James, 1983. "The effective tax rate and the pretax rate of return," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 21(2), pages 129-158, July.
    2. Don Fullerton, 1983. "Which Effective Tax Rate?," NBER Working Papers 1123, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Martin Feldstein & Lawrence Summers, 1983. "Inflation and the Taxation of Capital Income in the Corporate Sector," NBER Chapters, in: Inflation, Tax Rules, and Capital Formation, pages 116-152, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Alan J. Auerbach, 1986. "The Dynamic Effects of Tax Law Asymmetries," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 53(2), pages 205-225.
    5. Stiglitz, Joseph E., 1973. "Taxation, corporate financial policy, and the cost of capital," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 2(1), pages 1-34, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lin, Hwan C. & Russo, Benjamin, 1999. "A Taxation Policy Toward Capital, Technology and Long-Run Growth," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 21(3), pages 463-491, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Don Fullerton, 1985. "The Indexation of Interest, Depreciation, and Capital Gains: A Model ofInvestment Incentives," NBER Working Papers 1655, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Don Fullerton & Marios Karayannis, 1987. "The Taxation of Income from Capital in the United States, 1980-86," NBER Working Papers 2478, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Robert S. Chirinko, 1985. "The Ineffectiveness of Effective Tax Rates on Business Investment," NBER Working Papers 1704, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Pindyck, Robert S, 1984. "Risk, Inflation, and the Stock Market," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 74(3), pages 335-351, June.
    5. Poterba, James M., 1998. "The rate of return to corporate capital and factor shares: new estimates using revised national income accounts and capital stock data," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 48(1), pages 211-246, June.
    6. Steven M. Fazzari & Benjamin Herzon, 1995. "Capital Gains Tax Cuts, Investment, and Growth," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_147, Levy Economics Institute.
    7. Fullerton, Don & Henderson, Yolanda Kodrzycki, 1989. "A Disaggregate Equilibrium Model of the Tax Distortions among Assets, Sectors, and Industries," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 30(2), pages 391-413, May.
    8. Casey B. Mulligan, 2002. "Capital, Interest, and Aggregate Intertemporal Substitution," NBER Working Papers 9373, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Alan J. Auerbach & James M. Poterba, 1987. "Why Have Corporate Tax Revenues Declined?," NBER Chapters, in: Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 1, pages 1-28, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Panteghini Paolo, 2001. "On Corporate Tax Asymmetries and Neutrality," German Economic Review, De Gruyter, vol. 2(3), pages 269-286, August.
    11. Austan Goolsbee, 2000. "The Importance of Measurement Error in the Cost of Capital," NBER Working Papers 7558, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Gérard, Marcel & Beauchot, Laurence & Jamaels, Sylvie & Valenduc, Christian, 1997. "MESC (Marginal Effective Statutory Charge), an extension of King-Fullerton methodology," Discussion Papers, Series II 353, University of Konstanz, Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 178 "Internationalization of the Economy".
    13. Ahmed, S., 2004. "Modelling corporate tax liabilities using company accounts: a new framework," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 0412, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    14. Don Fullerton & Andrew B. Lyon, 1988. "Tax Neutrality and Intangible Capital," NBER Chapters, in: Tax Policy and the Economy: Volume 2, pages 63-88, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Feldstein, Martin, 1995. "Fiscal policies, capital formation, and capitalism," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 39(3-4), pages 399-420, April.
    16. Hines, James R. & Park, Jongsang, 2019. "Investment ramifications of distortionary tax subsidies," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 172(C), pages 36-51.
    17. Martin Feldstein & Joosung Jun, 1987. "The Effects of Tax Rules on Nonresidential Fixed Investment: Some Preliminary Evidence from the 1980s," NBER Chapters, in: The Effects of Taxation on Capital Accumulation, pages 101-162, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    18. Don Fullerton, 1983. "Which Effective Tax Rate?," NBER Working Papers 1123, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    19. Roger H. Gordon & Burton G. Malkiel, 1980. "Taxation and Corporation Finance," NBER Working Papers 0576, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    20. Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, 2003. "An Empirical Analysis of the Risk Properties of Human Capital Returns," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 93(3), pages 948-964, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:1600. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.