题目：Taxing the Capital Intensive Intensively? -- Some Evidence in China and a Possible Explanation

时间：2013年1月11日  星期五 12:00 – 14:00

地点：明德主楼714

报告人：陈晓光

摘要：This papers attempts to offer some empirical evidence regarding the industry-specific tax policy in light of the micro-data in China. The paper uses the abolishment of agriculture tax across China around 2005 as a natural experiment to identify the behavior response of local governments in tax enforcement and the corresponding reaction of manufacturing firms in tax evasion. Diff-in-diff strategy is employed as we can use the variation across regions based on the facts that the agriculture-type region suffers more from the abolishment of agriculture tax and the local government there is therefore more likely to strengthen the tax enforcement. The heterogeneous treatment effect is identified along the dimension of industrial capital-intensity and regional political turnover. The results conclude that both the tax collection cost and political connection shape the tax policy of local governments in China. To be specific, if the local governor is replaced by another one from other regions after the abolishment of agriculture tax, then the effective corporate income tax rate would be higher in more capital-intensive industry. Otherwise, the capital-intensive industry has the same or even lower effective tax rate. The results can be explained by two existing theories. 1. Capital-intensive industry relies more on formal financial sector and its tax-base is more easily to be traced by tax authority. The tax collection cost on it is therefore lower and the effective tax rate should be higher (Gordon and Li, 2009). 2. Capital-intensive industry has more incentive to build the political connection than the less capital-intensive industry (Grossman and Helpman, 1994).

报告人简介：陈晓光，2005年毕业于北京大学光华管理学院，获经济学博士学位。2005年至今任职于中国人民大学财政金融学院。论文曾获得“邹至庄最佳论文奖”、“中金优秀经济学博士论文奖”等荣誉。研究兴趣为经济增长与发展、公共经济学，当前研究领域为发展中国家税收结构的决定因素与宏观影响。