主 讲 人：陈晓光

讲座题目：Taxation like Predation -- The Case in China

讲座时间：2017年6月14日(星期三)  19:00—21:00

讲座地点：学生会堂218报告厅

Abstract

Can a firm pay less tax by locating in a jurisdiction where government size is smaller or by residing with more neighbouring firms? The answer is yes in China. We study this question by investigating the cross-region correlation between firms' effective tax rates and two variables -- fiscal burden of local governments (a measurement of relative government size) and geographical density of firms. We measure the effective tax rate by the ratio of a firm’s total tax liability to its reported sales volumes, the fiscal burden by the number of employees in public sector, and the geographical density of firms by the total number of firms per unit area of a locality. We obtain the following findings: first, the correlation between the effective tax rate and fiscal burden across counties is positive; second, the correlation between the effective tax rate and firms density is robustly negative at the county and street level. These findings are puzzling because the tax codes are supposed to be uniform across the whole country and we have controlled for factors that affect the statutory tax rates. We argue that the paradox can be explained by a simple model of fishing in a lake where the cost of catching a fish is fixed and the number of fishermen is exogenously given. The findings provide a novel mechanism of firm clustering in addition to the Marshallian externalities.

相关链接：陈晓光，中国人民大学和西澳大学的经济学老师，邹至庄经济学奖得主，在“journal of public economics”.“economic letter”《经济研究》，《中国社会科学》，《经济学(季刊)》等杂志上发表过多篇论文。