Are Some Taxes Different than Others? An Empirical Investigation of Tax Policy in Canada

This paper investigates the response of major macroeconomic variables to four different types of tax policy innovations in Canada within a VAR framework. The positive tax multipliers documented in the previous literature are found only for corporate tax innovations. Our results imply that different taxes affect the output differently, and the composition of the total tax response may be a major factor behind cross-country variation in the sign and magnitude of total tax multipliers. Keywords: Tax Policy, VAR