Entrepreneurial activity is presumed to generate important spillovers, potentially justifying tax subsidies. How does the tax law affect individual incentives? How much of an impact has it had in practice? We first show theoretically that taxes can affect the incentives to be an entrepreneur due simply to differences in tax rates on business vs. wage and salary income, due to differences in the tax treatment of losses vs. profits through a progressive rate structure and through the option to incorporate, and due to risk-sharing with the government. We then provide empirical evidence using U.S. individual tax return data that these aspects of the tax law have had large effects on actual behavior.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
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Length: Date of creation: Jun 2002 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9015
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Find related papers by JEL classification: H3 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents H2 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Robert Carroll & Douglas Holtz-Eakin & Mark Rider & Harvey S. Rosen, 2001.
"Personal Income Taxes and the Growth of Small Firms,"
NBER Chapters,
in: Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 15, pages 121-148
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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