税收激励提高企业创新水平了吗?——基于企业生命周期理论的检验

Whether Tax Incentives Stimulate Corporate Innovation:Empirical Evidence Based on Corporate Life Cycle Theory

本文使用2007—2016年中国上市公司和地级市面板数据,测算企业前瞻性有效平均税率,从生命周期视角研究税收激励对企业创新的影响。实证结果表明:总体上看,税收激励显著促进企业研发投入;分生命周期阶段看,税收激励的作用集中体现于成熟期企业,对成长期和衰退期企业的影响不显著。现行税制设计及企业在不同生命周期阶段的投资策略、创新特点和融资状况的差异是产生这一现象的重要原因。分样本回归显示,税收激励显著促进成熟期的民营、高科技、制造业企业的研发投入,对其他类别或阶段的企业无显著影响。进而,本文以2014年的固定资产加速折旧政策为准自然实验,使用双重差分法识别了税收激励与企业创新的因果关系,得到一致的结论。考察企业专利还发现,税收激励使成熟期企业发明授权显著增加,提高了创新质量。本文研究对于推动减税降费改革以助力创新型国家的建设具有启示意义。

Summary:As China s economy transitions from high-speed growth to the“new normal”stage of high-quality development,the pattern of economic growth is shifting from factor-driven to technology-driven,and innovation is increasingly becoming a decisive factor in promoting high-quality development.Due to positive externalities,the irreversibility of investments,high costs,high risks and uncertain return horizons,the corporate R&D investments of enterprises in a laissez-faire market often fall short of the social optimum.To solve this market failure,governments around the world usually resort to tax incentives to encourage R&D activities,but there is no consensus on the effects of these policies.With China s reduction in taxes and fees,it is important to figure out how tax incentives affect corporate innovation.We propose that the key to understanding the controversies in the literature lies in the moderating effect of the corporate life cycle.There are significant differences in the profitability,tax base,development goal,R&D capability and willingness of companies at different stages of the life cycle,so the effects of tax incentives on innovation should exhibit firm heterogeneity.To test this theory,we use the financial report data of Chinese listed companies and prefecture-level data from 2007 to 2016 to construct the forward-looking effective average tax rate for companies,which measures the tax incentives for investment.We then determine the corporate life cycle stages using the cash flow pattern method and empirically examine how tax incentives affect corporate innovation.Our results show that tax incentives significantly promote corporate R&D investment,and tests using subsamples of firms in different life cycle stages reveal that the effect of the tax incentives is concentrated on firms in the mature stage,with the effects on companies in the growing or declining stages being insignificant.This phenomenon could be caused by the design of the current tax system,which favors companies in the mature stage,and by life-cycle differences in the investment strategies,innovation characteristics and financing conditions of companies.Further tests show that the effects of tax incentives on R&D activities are more pronounced for private,high-tech and manufacturing companies in the mature stage but are insignificant for other types of companies.To overcome underlying endogeneity issues,we take the accelerated depreciation policy of fixed assets launched in 2014 as a quasi-natural experiment.This policy provides tax preferences for some industries,allowing us to identify the causal relationship between tax incentives and corporate innovation.The results of a difference-in-differences model are consistent with our main findings.In robustness tests,we substitute patent data as the dependent variable and find that tax incentives significantly increase invention grants for companies in the mature stage,suggesting an improvement in innovation quality.We find that the corporate patenting activities of firms in other life-cycle stages do not respond to tax incentives.Our results are robust to alternative measures of tax incentives,definitions of corporate life-cycle stages and methods for dealing with omitted variables and selection bias.We make the following contributions.First,we extend the literature on this topic by integrating life-cycle theory into the discussion of the effects of tax incentives on corporate innovation.Second,in addition to using the forward-looking effective average tax rate to measure tax incentives,we provide a series of robustness tests for precise causal identification.Third,we conduct multi-dimensional tests according to the different corporate life cycle stages,ownership types and industrial attributes to uncover the heterogeneities in the effects of tax incentives on Chinese firms and discuss possible causes of the effects.We provide a reasonable explanation for the controversies in the literature and a reference for how to effectively encourage corporate innovation as China s tax and fee reductions go into full effect.It is important to design tax policies that fit the characteristics of the different corporate life cycle stages and to adjust the current tax system to promote the construction of an innovative nation more actively and effectively.