Corporate Taxation and Exports

This paper analyses the relationship between corporate taxes and exports at firm level in Italy. We use an integrated dataset that combines for the period 2004-2006 survey data (Indagine sulle Imprese Manifatturiere) on enterprises and company accounts for the manufacturing sector to estimate a Probit and a Tobit model. Our results suggest that export participation as well as export intensity increase with corporate taxation. Consistently with recent developments of the corporate tax incidence theory in an open economy, this finding can be traced out to greater ability of exporting firms to shift the tax burden on international markets, compared to domestic firms. Calculation of the average and the marginal corporate tax rates uses the methodology recently developed by Egger et al. (2009) which allows deriving firm-specific effective corporate tax rates.