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On December 22, 2017, President Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), the most sweeping revision of US tax law since the Tax Reform Act of 1986. The law introduced many significant changes. However, perhaps none was as important as the changes in the treatment of traditional “C” corporations—those corporations subject to a separate corporate income tax. Beginning in 2018, the federal corporate tax rate fell from 35 percent to 21 percent, some investment qualified for immediate deduction as an expense, and multinational corporations faced a substantially modified treatment of their activities. This paper seeks to evaluate the impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to understand its effects on resource allocation and distribution. It compares US corporate tax rates to other countries before the 2017 tax law, and describes ways in which the US corporate sector has evolved that are especially relevant to tax policy. The discussion then turns the main changes of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 for the corporate income tax. A range of estimates suggests that the law is likely to contribute to increased US capital investment and, through that, an increase in US wages. The magnitude of these increases is extremely difficult to predict. Indeed, the public debate about the benefits of the new corporate tax provisions enacted (and the alternatives not adopted) has highlighted the limitations of standard approaches in distributional analysis to assigning corporate tax burdens.

We hypothesize that corporate income taxes distort firms’ incentives to innovate by reducing their pledgeable income. Using a differences-in-differences methodology, we document that large corporate income tax cuts boost corporate innovation. We find a similar but opposite effect for tax increases. Most of the change in innovation occurs 2 or more years after the tax change, and there’s no effect before the tax change. Exploring the mechanisms, we show that tax cuts have a stronger impact on innovation for firms with weaker governance, greater financial constraints, fewer tangible assets, smaller patent stock, and a greater degree of tax avoidance.

Based on the experience of recent decades, the United States apparently musters the political will to change its tax system comprehensively about every 30 years, so it seems especially important to get it right when the chance arises. Based on the strong public statements of economists opposing and supporting the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, a causal observer might wonder whether this law was tax reform or mere confusion. In this paper, I address that question and, more importantly, offer an assessment of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The law is clearly not “tax reform” as economists usually use that term: that is, it does not seek to broaden the tax base and reduce marginal rates in a roughly revenue-neutral manner. However, the law is not just a muddle. It seeks to address some widely acknowledged issues with corporate taxation, and takes some steps toward broadening the tax base, in part by reducing the incentive to itemize deductions.

This paper examines the mobility response of high-income households in the United States to a provision in a 2017 tax law that limited the federal deductibility of state and local taxes. The increase in the effective price of state and local taxes induced by the cap on deductibility caused high-income households to leave high-tax states in favor of low-tax states and to prefer low-tax states to high-tax states conditional on moving. The findings suggest that policymakers should take seriously the prospect that high-income taxpayers may flee states that tax them heavily, which could have long-lasting implications for states’ fiscal positions.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was the largest tax overhaul since 1986. Our assessment — based on a variety of sources — suggests that the act will do the following: stimulate the economy in the near term but have small impacts on longterm growth; reduce federal revenues; make the distribution of after-tax income less equal; simplify taxes in some ways but create new complexity and compliance issues in others; and reduce health insurance coverage and charitable contributions. Its ultimate effects will depend on how other countries, the Federal Reserve Board, and future Congresses respond.

The enactment of the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) significantly changes the landscape for tax planning and compliance by U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs). The promised shift to a more territorial system actually results in a greater likelihood that more of a U.S. MNC’s foreign income is subject to current U.S. taxation. The TCJA complicates effective tax planning for such firms, forcing them to reexamine their existing global structures and financial arrangements (i.e., the “geometry” of international tax planning). We briefly review international tax planning before the TCJA as well as some key international tax provisions in the TCJA. We then provide a method to estimate the new Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income (GILTI) tax from a U.S. MNC’s financial statements when such information is not publicly disclosed and illustrate the effective tax rate (ETR) and GILTI tax effects for a small sample of public firms after the TCJA. Finally, we discuss some likely changes in international tax planning going forward.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 marked a significant change in U.S. domestic and international tax policy, altering incentives for U.S. firms to own foreign assets. We examine the initial response of U.S. firms’ foreign acquisition patterns to the TCJA’s key reform provisions. We find a significant overall decrease in the probability that a foreign target is acquired by a U.S. firm after the reform, suggesting that the net effect of the TCJA was to reduce acquisitions abroad. Cross-sectional variation across target and acquirer characteristics points to the elimination of the repatriation tax and the TCJA’s global intangible low-taxed income (GILTI) regime as critically influencing cross-border acquisitions by U.S. firms. Specifically, U.S. acquirers with little foreign presence prior to the TCJA are more likely to acquire a foreign target, while U.S. acquirers are less likely to acquire profitable targets in low-tax countries. Results from our empirical analyses are consistent with the TCJA prompting fewer but more value-enhancing, less tax-motivated foreign acquisitions by U.S. firms.

This paper discusses the potential consequences of the international tax provisions of the recent Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA), drawing on existing research. It uses the observed behavior of firms during the 2005 repatriation tax holiday to infer the relative burdens created by the repatriation tax and by the TCJA’s new “Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income” (GILTI) tax, and it concludes that the TCJA increases the tax burden on U.S. residence for many, and perhaps most, U.S. firms. It also argues that the GILTI and “Foreign-Derived Intangible Income” (FDII) provisions will create substantial distortions to the ownership of assets, both in the United States and around the world.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) was signed into law by former President Donald J. Trump in 2017.The law took effect on January 1, 2018.The law permanently cut the corporate tax rate to 21% and temporarily lowered individual tax rates. Evidence in this paper will demonstrate how an older married couple on Social Security and a modest pension actually incurred higher federal income taxes during the years 2018- 2021 as a result of TCJA. Paying higher federal income taxes as a result of TCJA is the Trump Tax Penalty.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) significantly changed federal income taxation, including limiting SALT (state and local property, income, and sales taxes) deductibility to $10,000. We estimate the TCJA’s differential effect on red- and blue-state taxpayers and the SALT limitation’s contribution to this differential. We find an average increase in remaining lifetime spending of 1.6 percent in red states versus 1.3 percent in blue states. Among the richest 10 percent of households, red states enjoyed a 2 percent increase compared to 1.2 percent in blue states, with the gap driven almost entirely by the SALT deduction limitation.