Do Capital Tax Incentives Attract New Businesses? Evidence across Industries from the New Markets Tax Credit

All levels of government pursue policies to attract new businesses with the hope that these enterprises will create local economic growth. In this paper, we use the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) to determine the effect of a capital tax credit on where firms in different types of industries locate. When estimating the impact of the NMTC on business location, there are likely to be unobservable local characteristics that are correlated with where businesses choose to open that would cause OLS estimates to be biased. To control for the endogenous selection, we use a plausibly exogenous eligibility cutoff and compare census tracts that are just eligible for the tax credit to those that are just ineligible. Using data from the Dun and Bradstreet MarketPlace Files, we find that in Metropolitan Statistical Areas, the NMTC incentivized new businesses to locate in tracts that were eligible for the tax credit in 2002 and 2004. However, we find that in 2006 the tax credit deterred new establishments. When we stratify the 2006 sample by industry, we find that this capital tax credit attracted more capital intensive industries, such as manufacturing, while deterring more labor intensive industries, such as services. Our results are important to policy makers, as we find that the type of tax credit offered causes a sorting of different industries across locations.