A Tale of Two Taxes: State-Dependency of Tax Policy

Abstract

In this paper, we build a simple endogenous growth model with labour and corporate taxes to investigate the asymmetric effects of tax policy over the growth trajectory. We employ a newly developed panel smooth transition model to empirically analyse a sample of 19 advanced economies over the 1961-2017 period. We find that both the asymmetric effects and the tax measures used are essential. We also find that the effects of corporate and personal taxes on long-run growth are non-linear, while the detrimental effects of personal taxes are empirically larger compared to those of corporate taxes once non-linearities are controlled for.