Tax Incentives Policy, Firm Investment, Firm exports, and Gross Output: Panel Econometric Modelling

A panel econometric model consisting of 118,380 firms, spanning 2014 to 2019 was used to determine the impact of tax incentive policy on firm investment, firm gross output, and exports. A two-stage modelling approach was used, first the decision to invest or export was modelled using a binary logit model. In the second phase, the impact of the tax incentives policy was estimated. The decisions to export and invest are marginally driven by tax incentive policy. A shilling given as tax expenditure increases the probability of investing and exporting by 0.018% and 0.48% respectively. The results from the study imply that export and investment-related tax incentives are either redundant or have a negligible impact on their respective target variables.

Government Borrowing and Crowding Out

We investigate the impact of fiscal expansions on firm investment by exploiting firms that have multiple banking relationships. Further, we conduct a localized RDD approach and compare the lending behavior of banks that barely met and missed the criteria of being a primary dealer, as well as barely winners and losers at government auctions. Our results indicate that a 1 percentage point increase in banks’ bonds-to-assets ratio decreases loans by up to 0.4%, which leads to significant declines in firm investment, profits and wages. Our findings are grounded in a quantitative model with financial and real sectors with which we undertake a welfare analysis and compute the cost of government borrowing on the overall economy.

Impact of macroeconomic and microeconomic variables on firm investment: Mexican service sector, 2000-2016

A large and positive relationship is found to exist in the long-run between Public Investment Expenditures and Firm Investment which shows that public investment crowds in private investment using ARDL model at macroeconomic level on the Mexican service sector over the period 2000-2016. I also use the system-GMM PVAR to analyse the impact of microeconomic variables on firm investment. Exports have a strong and positive impact while Imports have a large and negative impact on firm investment. At the microeconomic level, taxes payments slightly obstruct firm investment. Using impulse response functions, I find that long-run macroeconomic policies are more important than short-run macroeconomic policies and that macroeconomic policies are more important than microeconomic policies for firm’s investment decisions.

Demand Shocks and Firm Investment: Micro-evidence from fiscal retrenchment in Italy

We study the effect of a persistent demand shock on corporate factor utilization. Our identification strategy leverages a legislative change designed to permanently reduce spending in certain targeted municipalities. This change generates an arguably-exogenous drop in the revenue of procurement firms, which differs depending on each firm’s reliance for its revenue on procurement in the targeted municipalities. We find that firms responded to the demand shock by cutting capital rather than labor. We propose a theoretical mechanism based on the irreversibility of capital investment.