IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/capwps/201904.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Jurisdictional tax rates: How the corporate tax system fuels concentration and inequality

Author

Listed:
  • Hager, Sandy Brian
  • Baines, Joseph

Abstract

Corporate concentration in the United States has been on the rise in recent years, sparking a heated debate about its causes, consequences, and potential remedies. In this study, we examine a facet of public policy that has been largely neglected in current debates about concentration: corporate tax policy. As part of our analysis we develop the first empirical mapping of the effective tax rates (ETRs) of nonfinancial corporations disaggregated by size and broken down by jurisdiction. Our findings reveal a striking and persistent tax advantage for big business in recent decades. Since the mid-1980s, large corporations have faced lower worldwide ETRs relative to their smaller counterparts. The regressive worldwide ETR is driven by persistent regressivity in the domestic ETR and a marked drop in the progressivity of the foreign ETR over the past decade. We go on to show how persistent regressivity in the worldwide tax structure is bound up with the increasing relative power of large corporations within the corporate universe, as well as a shift in firm-level power relations. As large corporations become less disposed to investments that may indirectly benefit ordinary workers, they become more disposed to shareholder value enhancement that directly benefits the asset-rich. What this means is that the corporate tax structure is connected not only to rising corporate concentration, but also to widening household inequality.

Suggested Citation

  • Hager, Sandy Brian & Baines, Joseph, 2019. "Jurisdictional tax rates: How the corporate tax system fuels concentration and inequality," Working Papers on Capital as Power 2019/04, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism.
  • Handle: RePEc:zbw:capwps:201904
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/209542/1/1683344669.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    corporate taxation; differential accumulation; dominant capital inequality;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:zbw:capwps:201904. 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: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.capitalaspower.com/ .

    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.