| 主讲人 |
陈晓光 |
简介 |
<p>We investigate the effect of investment tax credit on allocative efficiency of capital across firms. Most existing studies examined the average effect on investment of individual firms, and found that the lumpy investment caused by investment frictions plays an important role in that average effect. We argue that the investment frictions should affect both upward and downward adjustment in capital in a standard model of physical capital market with frictions. Tax credit may not only incentivize investment of some firms but also boost dis-investment of others. Motivated by that argument, we focus on the heterogeneous effect across firms characterised by their initial MRPK (or TFP) in order to examine the capital reallocation. Based on the first two pilots of VAT transformation reform in China and firm data from Annual Survey of Industrial Production conducted (2000-2008), we employ the Difference-in-Difference-in-Differences (DDD) to identify the effect of investment tax credit on firms' real capital stock and marginal revenue product of capital (MRPK). The results suggest that the tax credit reform led to reallocation of capital and convergence in MRPK across firms. The reallocation improves the aggregate efficiency measured by various indicators. However, regressions including stronger fixed effects do not show significant effects either on firms' average TFP or on dispersion in firms' market power. The finding suggests that we should be cautious about the average effect of tax incentives on investment since it could be small, ambiguous, or not robust due to opposing heterogeneous effects across firms; while that the effect on the aggregate efficiency could be salient thanks to the capital reallocation.</p> |
