Bank profitability and taxation

Ugo Albertazzi () and Leonardo Gambacorta ()
Additional contact information
Ugo Albertazzi: Banca d'Italia

No 649, Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research Department

Abstract: This paper investigates how bank profitability is affected by corporate income tax (CIT) using aggregate data on the banking sector of the main industrialized countries for the period 1981-2003. Two main novelties emerge with respect to the existing literature. First, the paper explicitly considers that CIT is not specific to the banking sector, so that changes in the CIT rate can affect both banks and borrowing firmsÂ’ behaviour. Thus, with the help of a simple theoretical model we derive a set of predictions about the impact of CIT on banksÂ’ income statement. Second, by considering all the main components of banksÂ’ profit and loss accounts, we are able to test such predictions and to disentangle the extent to which a bank is able to shift its tax-burden onto its borrowers, depositors, and purchasers of fee-generating services. It turns out that CIT has a substantial impact on the composition of banking sector revenues but cannot explain large differences in the level of profitability across countries.

Keywords: tax-shifting; corporate income tax; bank profitability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C53 G20 G21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cfn and nep-eec
Date: 2007-11

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/econo/tem ... d649/en_tema_649.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Bank Profitability and Taxation (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research Department
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().