This Economic Letter discusses how the unique economic nature of R&D may bear on the question of the constitutionality of state R&D tax credits. In particular, I discuss the conditions laid out by the U.S. Supreme Court for determining the constitutionality of a state tax credit and how economic...

The share of corporate profits in the U.S. collected by state governments via the corporate income tax has fallen sharply in the past quarter century. Some commentators have even referred to this as the "disappearance" of the state corporate income tax (SCIT). Such claims, of course, are an...

The recession that began in late 2007 severely reduced state tax revenue and increased demand for many public services. In the near term, institutional and political factors limit the options states have for cutting spending and raising taxes. Aid to states in the federal economic program is...

Taxes collected by the U.S. government are paid out through transfers that promote economic equity among states. This system redistributes funds between richer and poorer states over the long run and helps stabilize states hit by temporary economic shocks. Surprisingly, little if any of this...

The standard model of strategic tax competition – the non-cooperative tax-setting behavior of jurisdictions competing for a mobile capital tax base – assumes that government policymakers are perfectly benevolent, acting solely to maximize the utility of the representative resident in their...

This article develops a framework for simulating the effects of state business taxes on state investment and output. Our simulations provide the predicted increase in investment—both in equipment and structures (E&S) and in research and development (R&D)—and the predicted increase in output...

There is an ongoing debate in the U.S. among policymakers and the courts concerning the practical effects of state investment tax incentives. However, this debate often suffers from a lack of clear information on the extent of such incentives among states and how these incentives have evolved...

In this paper, I exploit the cross-sectional and time-series variation in R&D tax credits, and in turn the user cost of R&D, available from U.S. states between 1981-2002 to estimate the elasticity of private R&D with respect to both the within-state (internal) user cost and the out-of-state...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the determination of capital tax policy by U.S. states based on new panel data, a new econometric technique, and a new theoretical model. The analysis is undertaken with a panel data set covering all 48 contiguous states for the period 1969 to 2004...

Though the U.S. federal investment tax credit (ITC) was permanently repealed in 1986, state-level ITCs have proliferated over the last few decades. The proliferation of state ITCs and other investment tax incentives raises two important questions: (1) Are these tax incentives effective in...