Code for: "Dividend Taxes and the Allocation of Capital: Comment"

Boissel and Matray (2022) find that investment increased after 2013 in French firms facing higher dividend taxes. We identify an alteration in the code plotting the event-study of the effect of this reform on investment. Using identical data and removing this alteration, we find differential pre-trends between treated and control firms. We also establish that the controls referred to as “size growth”, used in all the diff-in-diff specifications, effectively are controls for lagged investment, i.e., the main outcome variable. Removing such controls attenuates differential pre-trends but leaves no clear event-study evidence of a positive effect of dividend taxation on investment.