Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 28 May 2025, LG 0.423
You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 28 May 2025, from 13.15 to 14.45 pm. The seminar will be held in room LG 0.423. Florian Neumeier (ifo Institute) will be talking about “Pricing in the Taxman: A Comprehensive Analysis of Corporate Tax Incidence”.
More information can be found here:
This paper presents novel estimates on the incidence of corporate taxes by measuring the effect of local business tax increases on the welfare of commercial landowners. We use unique data on commercial real estate prices in Germany covering 1.1 million properties offered for sale and over 3 million properties offered for rent between 2008 and 2019. Empirically, we exploit the German institutional setting with over 17,000 municipal tax changes using an event study design. The estimates suggest that a 1 percentage point business tax increase reduces commercial real estate prices by 3 percent after 4 years on average, while commercial rents stay almost unchanged. This result is robust to the inclusion of a large set of controls and to estimators that account for heterogeneous treatment effects. We use the reduced-form estimates to update current incidence measures and find that commercial landowners bear a significant share of the tax burden (≈ 40%) that increases over time, while workers (≈ 9%) and residential landowners (≈ 15%) are likely to bear a smaller burden than prior research suggests, with firm owners bearing around 36%.