Using data from U.S. corporate tax returns, we investigate the differential investment propensities of public and private firms. Tax return data uniquely provide rich detail on corporate investment reported under identical standards and is representative of the universe of U.S. corporations....

We develop a method for identifying public firms in tax records in order to compare the investments of public and private firms using a representative sample of all US corporations. Despite private firms being significantly smaller than public firms on average, in aggregate, they account for an...