Taxation of Small Firms under Uncertainty - A Real Option View of Firm Creation

This paper addresses the impact of the tax system on the incentives to become self-employed. The new approach here is that the creation of a firm is assumed to be an opportunity but not an obligation, that is, a real option. A comprehensive income tax system and a "dual" tax system of the Nordic type are compared. The comprehensive system Yields a higher threshold with respect to creating a firm than the dual system. <p> Swedish data on disposable income for different socio-economic groups are used to evaluate the relevance of the critical assumptions in the model and to find parameter estimates. A result is that the assumptions are consistent with data for white-collar labor but not for blue-collar labor.