This paper examines how firms’ tax policy expectations (TPE) evolve around and relate to their investment responses to changes in tax policy. Using a text‐based approach to measuring TPE, we find that two recent tax policy–changing events—namely, the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the enactment of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA)—spawned considerable between‐ and within‐firm variation in TPE, with aggregate time‐series patterns in TPE occasionally challenging prevailing assumptions in previous research. Further, we observe that event‐induced TPE relate to investment both before and in response to the TCJA's passage in 2017, with offsetting associations between its first and second moments, and that these TPE moderate the TCJA's intended investment‐stimulating effect. Furthermore, we document a difference between domestic and multinational firms in their TPE‐investment response, with the former (latter) more likely to adjust the level (shift the country location) of their investment. Overall, our findings support the idea that TPE can impact investment behavior in the face of a tax policy change and suggest that our methodology can be used by future research to incorporate TPE into analyses of tax policy effects.

中文翻译：

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税收政策预期与投资


本文研究了企业的税收政策预期（TPE）如何围绕税收政策变化的投资反应而演变并与其相关。使用基于文本的方法来衡量 TPE，我们发现最近的两次税收政策变化事件，即 2016 年美国总统大选和《减税和就业法案》(TCJA) 的颁布，在公司之间和公司内部产生了相当大的影响。 TPE 的变化，TPE 的聚合时间序列模式偶尔会挑战先前研究中的普遍假设。此外，我们观察到，事件引发的 TPE 与 2017 年 TCJA 通过之前和之后的投资相关，其第一时刻和第二时刻之间存在抵消关联，并且这些 TPE 调节了 TCJA 预期的投资刺激效应。此外，我们记录了国内和跨国公司在 TPE 投资反应上的差异，前者（后者）更有可能调整其投资水平（转移国家位置）。总体而言，我们的研究结果支持 TPE 在税收政策变化时可以影响投资行为的观点，并表明未来的研究可以使用我们的方法将 TPE 纳入税收政策影响的分析中。