 The incentive effects of R&D tax credits: An empirical examination in an emerging economyMing-Chin Chen and Sanjay Gupta Journal of Contemporary Accounting and Economics, 2017, vol. 13, issue 1, 52-68 Abstract: This paper investigates whether an increase in the R&D tax credit rate stimulates firms’ incremental R&D spending. We find that the increase in the credit rate has a positive effect on the R&D spending of high-tech firms with taxable status, but does not have the same positive effect on non-high tech firms. These results indicate that tax incentives alone may not be effective to increase R&D spending if firms do not have profitable innovation opportunities. Further, we find that when the tax incentive is structured as a credit based on incremental R&D spending over a moving-average base, firms opportunistically time their R&D spending patterns to obtain additional tax credits, resulting in greater variability in R&D spending and potentially the unintended loss of tax revenues. This study contributes to the ongoing global debate about the efficacy of tax policies toward R&D by providing firm-level evidence from a large cross-section of firms in an emerging economy. Keywords: Research and development expenditure; R&D tax credits; Tax incentives; Emerging economy (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jocaae:v:13:y:2017:i:1:p:52-68 DOI: 10.1016/j.jcae.2017.01.001 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Contemporary Accounting and Economics is currently edited by Agnes C.S. Cheng, P. Clarkson, F.A. Gul, Zoltan Matolcsy, Dan Simunic and Ben Srinidhi More articles in Journal of Contemporary Accounting and Economics from Elsevier |
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