Nonlinear growth effects of taxation: A semi-parametric approach using average marginal Tax Rates

Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Journal of Applied Econometrics

Publication Date

8-1-2013

Abstract

One of the major challenges of empirical tax research is the identification and calculation of appropriate tax data. While there is consensus that average marginal tax rates are most suitable for studying the effects of tax policy on economic growth, because of data limitations the calculation of marginal tax rates has been limited to the USA and the UK. This paper provides calculations of average marginal tax rates for the four Scandinavian countries using the methodologies of Seater (1982, 1985) and Barro and Sahasakul (1983, 1986). Then, by pooling the newly calculated tax rates for the Scandinavian countries with the data for the USA and the UK, we investigate the effects of tax policy shocks on the per capita GDP growth rate. Our results suggest that an increase in average marginal tax rates has a negative impact on economic growth. Employing additive mixed panel models with penalized splines as estimation approach, we show that changes in tax rates have nonlinear effects. Increasing average marginal tax rates turn out to be the most distorting at relatively moderate tax rates. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

ISSN

0883-7252

Publisher

Wiley

Volume

28

Issue

5

First Page

883

Last Page

899

Disciplines

Business

Scopus ID

84880969216

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

no

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