IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/imf/imfwpa/2022-079.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on Foreign Investment in the United States

Author

Listed:
  • Ms. Thornton Matheson
  • Mr. Alexander D Klemm
  • Laura Power
  • Thomas Brosy

Abstract

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) sharply reduced effective corporate income tax rates on equity-financed US investment. This paper examines the reform’s impact on US inbound foreign direct investment (FDI) and investment in property, plant and equipment (PPE) by foreign-owned US companies. We first model effective marginal and average tax rates (EMTRs and EATRs) by country, industry, and method of finance, and then use those tax rates to calculate the tax semi-elasticities of inbound FDI and PPE investment. We find that both PPE investment and FDI financed with retained earnings responded positively to the TCJA reform, but FDI financed with new equity or debt did not. In country-level PPE regressions, inclusion of macroeconomic controls renders tax rate coefficients insignificant, suggesting that the increase in PPE investment after TCJA was driven by general economic growth. In regressions of FDI financed with retained earnings, however, tax coefficients were robust to inclusion of macroeconomic controls. As the literature predicts, EATRs have a greater impact on cross-border investment than EMTRs. Country-by-industry regressions showed a larger effect of taxes on PPE investment than aggregate country-level regressions, but industry-level tax rates appear to have no effect on earnings retention.

Suggested Citation

  • Ms. Thornton Matheson & Mr. Alexander D Klemm & Laura Power & Thomas Brosy, 2022. "The Impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on Foreign Investment in the United States," IMF Working Papers 2022/079, International Monetary Fund.
    • Handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2022/079
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=517616
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dhammika Dharmapala, 2023. "The Consequences of the 2017 US International Tax Reform: A Survey of the Evidence," CESifo Working Paper Series 10802, CESifo.
    2. Andreas Baur & Clemens Fuest & David Gstrein & Philipp Heil & Niklas Potrafke & Aurel Rochell, 2023. "The Impact of the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) on the German Economy," ifo Forschungsberichte, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, number 137.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2022/079. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Akshay Modi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/imfffus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.