Evaluating State and Local Business Tax Incentives

Abstract

for helpful comments and discussions. Stephanie Kestelman and Dustin Swonder provided excellent research assistance. We thank Carlianne Patrick for providing us data on million-dollar plants. This work is supported by National Science Foundation under Grant Number 1752431. We declare that we have no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

The Return to Big City Experience: Evidence from Refugees in Denmark

“…We further show that a large part of this premium can be accounted for by the industries, occupations, and firms present in big cities. Our findings suggest that theories of firm location decisions (e.g., Fajgelbaum et al (2019); Bilal (2020); Slattery and Zidar (2020)) are central to understanding the fundamental determinants of wage growth differences across space. They also lend credence to the idea that moving to a big city is akin to an investment in your future earnings path (see Bilal and Rossi-Hansberg (2018)).…”

Seeing like a city: how tech became urban

“…Innovation policies run the gamut from direct subsidies to individual tech businesses for promised job creation to indirect subsidies for workforce development through STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) curricula in public schools. Although research shows that paying companies to locate or maintain jobs in a specific place is not productive, elected officials nearly always feel vulnerable to firms’ threats that they will move to where taxes are lower and other local governments are more generous (Schwartz 2018 ; Slattery and Zidar 2020 ). In San Francisco and Seattle, such threats, amplified by intense lobbying and public relations campaigns, have resulted in tax reductions for tech companies like Twitter and Amazon and even reversals of city council decisions.…”

Economic Statecraft: Is There a Sub-National Dimension? Evidence from United States–China Rivalry

“…While the cross-border spillovers purportedly created by Chinese city and provincial governments have been much discussed, the potential impact on Chinese commercial interests policy intervention by US state, city, and town governments is barely remarked upon or studied. 1 This is curious given that a new dataset on business incentives offered by US state and local governments has been made available (Bartik, 2017) which, in turn, has been a contributing factor in stimulating a wave of research on the domestic impact of such policy intervention (Suarez Serrato and Zidar, 2016;Ossa, 2018;Slattery, 2018;Chava et al, 2019;Fajgelbaum et al, 2019;Slattery, 2020;Slattery and Zidar, 2020). 2 My focus here on the potential adverse cross-border spillovers created by US sub-national governments should be put in its appropriate global context.…”