Corporate taxation and exports

The paper analyses the relationship between corporate taxes and exports at firm level. We use an integrated dataset that combines, for the period 2004-2006, survey data(Indagine sulle Imprese Manifatturiere) and company accounts for the manufacturing sector to estimate a Probit and a Tobit model. Our results suggest that export participation as well as export intensity increase with corporate taxation. Consistently with recent developments of the corporate tax incidence theory, this finding can be traced out to the greater ability of exporting firms to shift the tax burden on international markets, compared to domestic firms. Calculation of the average and marginal corporate tax rates uses the methodology recently developed by Egger et al. (2009) which allows deriving firm-specific effective corporate tax rates.