针对设备投资的固定资产税的实证分析

Property tax has been noted as a case of "Good local tax" in the literature. Such argument however presumes that property tax is levied solely on land. In practice, property tax applies to housing and depreciable assets such as machine and building, which implies the feature of capital tax. It is known that capital tax distorts capital investment. The present paper analyzes effect of property tax on capital investment. To be concrete, we use panel data of manufacture census and examine how property tax on depreciable assets in Japan affects capital investments by small and medium enterprises. It is established that property tax negatively affect their investment and such adverse effect is exacerbated among enterprises with liquidity constraints.