Wage Response to Corporate Income Taxes: A Meta-Regression Analysis

The wage elasticity to corporate income tax (CIT) is an essential parameter for assessing tax policy reforms. This paper applies meta-regression analysis to quantitatively review the growing empirical tax incidence literature that indicates a substantial shift of the tax burden onto employees. While most studies report a large wage-reducing effect of the CIT, our findings suggest that estimates with positive values are published less often than they should. After accounting for the bias, our average estimate of the semi-elasticity suggests that the tax incidence effect on wages is economically small: a one percentage point increase in the corporate tax rate is associated with a decline in wages of only 0.054% to 0.078%. Moreover, we find that the CIT variable, econometric method, data, and underlying theoretical mechanism of studies drive the heterogeneity among estimates.