Corporate taxation and location of intangible assets: Patents vs. trademarks

Olena Dudar and Johannes Voget

No 16-015, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: Numerous empirical studies have analysed the influence of corporate taxation on the location of intangible assets within a company group. However, the previous literature has rather focused on studying the impact of taxation on patent location choices assuming that these assets represent the rest of intangibles as well. This paper complements previous studies by estimating and comparing the tax elasticities of two different types of intangibles - patents and trademarks. We employ data on European and US patent and trademark applications in the period of 1996-2012 and estimate a multinomial logit model that incorporates various observed and unobserved factors of the intangible's location choice. According to our main findings, trademarks are more sensitive to changes in taxation as compared to patents. This implies that firms use trademarks more eagerly for tax planning purposes than patents.

Keywords: intangible assets; patent; trademark; tax planning; corporate taxation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F23 H25 H26 H3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-dcm, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~, nep-pbe and nep-pub
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:16015

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