企业职工教育经费税改的再分配效应:理论逻辑与经验证据

Redistribution Effect of the Pre-tax Deduction Reform of Employee Education Funds: Theoretical Logic and Empirical Evidence

企业内部收入差异是社会不平等的重要来源之一,而众多研究指出企业税惠在促进企业发展的同时可能加剧企业内部收入不平等,考察企业税惠政策对于收入不平等的改善作用具有重要意义。文章主要关注企业职工教育经费税前抵扣政策改革对企业内收入分配的影响。文章利用包含异质性员工的企业与员工的动态博弈模型解析了该税惠改革影响企业内部不平等的机制。然后,基于2015年职工教育经费税改这一准自然实验,利用双重差分法对此税改的再分配效应进行了检验。分析显示,我国企业职工教育经费税前抵扣政策改革激励企业增加了员工的教育投入,这提高了企业生产率和改善了企业内部收入不平等。该项税惠对非国有企业、大企业、大规模行业中的企业的内部收入不平等的缩减效应更显著。文章的分析表明,企业税惠政策可以兼顾效率与公平,而激励企业进行员工再教育是个重要发展方向。

Within-firm income inequality is one source of social disparity. Many studies have indicated that corporate tax benefits could worsen within-firm income inequality while promoting firm growth. Therefore, it is crucial to investigate which types of corporate tax benefits can alleviate within-firm income inequality. This paper focuses on the impact of this tax reform on income distribution within a firm. This paper describes rent sharing as a dynamic game model between employers and heterogeneous employees, and explains the mechanism by which tax reform affects within-firm income inequality. Using the data from listed firms in China, it evaluates the impact of the tax reform using the DID method. The empirical results show that the reform reduces within-firm income inequality by encouraging firms to invest more in their employees' training.Furthermore, non-SOEs, larger firms, or firms in larger industries benefit significantly from this reform.This paper shows that corporate tax policies can be designed to achieve both efficiency and equity, with the key lying in whether the interests of employees have been taken into account. Encouraging firms to strengthen the re-education and training of their employees is an important direction. On the one hand, it improves the relative bargaining power of employees and mitigates within-firm income inequality. On the other hand, technological innovation also requires employee collaboration. Therefore, a biased tax benefit is helpful in making the process of innovation-driven growth more inclusive. This paper contributes to the literature in three ways:(1) The pre-tax deduction reform of employee education funds, which highlights the importance of re-education, may mitigate within-firm income inequality while improving firm productivity.(2) The empirical research in this paper is based on theoretical analysis. Mathematical models are used to demonstrate the logic of the heterogeneous impact of tax reform on employees.(3) Using the 2015 tax reform as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper first identifies the impact of firms' education investment on reducing income inequality.