Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/202887 
Year of Publication: 
2018
Series/Report no.: 
Upjohn Institute Working Paper No. 18-289
Publisher: 
W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, Kalamazoo, MI
Abstract: 
This paper reviews the research literature in the United States on effects of state and local "economic development incentives". Such incentives are tax breaks or grants, provided by state or local governments to individual firms, that are intended to affect firms' decisions about business location, expansion, or job retention. Incentives' benefits versus costs depend greatly on what percentage of incented firms would not have made a particular location/expansion/retention decision "but for" the incentive. Based on a review of 34 estimates of "but for" percentages, from 30 different studies, this paper concludes that typical incentives probably tip somewhere between 2 percent and 25 percent of incented firms toward making a decision favoring the location providing the incentive. In other words, for at least 75 percent of incented firms, the firm would have made a similar decision location/expansion/retention decision without the incentive. Many of the current incentive studies are positively biased toward overestimating the "but for" percentage. Better estimates of "but for" percentages depend on developing data that quantitatively measure diverse changes in incentive policies across comparable areas.
Subjects: 
Tax incentives
business location decisions
local economic development
JEL: 
R30
R12
H71
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.