Enterprise Income Tax Reform, The Change Of Actual Tax Burden, And Enterprises Investment Behavior Difference

The new Enterprise Income Tax Law, the implementation of which brought exogenous shocks which will inevitably have a tremendous impact on the production and management behavior of enterprises, was introduced on January 1, 2008, and this dissertation takes the business investment as the cutting point of discussing the economic effects of tax reform.Based on the review of the relevant references of "Tax-Investment" research area home and abroad, The thesis concludes that some limitations exit, no matter from the standpoint of theory or technology, in the area of "Tax-Investment" relationship research which used to study the problem by using the user cost of capital.On the part of theoretical analysis, the thesis first deduces the "Tax-Investment" relationship from the dimensions of optimal capital stock, investment income and the user cost of capital,which reveals that taxes have multiple effects, including the impact of operating costs, benefits, etc., on the enterprises' investment behavior, and then, on this basis, the research route of "statutory tax rate - actual tax burden - investment behavior" has been put forward, furthermore, after elaborating the tax policy changes brought about by the new Enterprise Income Tax Law, the thesis proposes its research hypotheses.In research design section, the dissertation, according to the study requirements, screens samples, selects and defines the variables that are used in empirical test, and builds the empirical models.The focus of the thesis is empirical test. In this section, in order to explore the annual changes of the indicators selected and tentatively analysis execution traces of the new Enterprise Income Tax Law, the description of statistical analysis is firstly done. Secondly, the thesis tests the yearly variation of the tax index and investment index and the variation between the samples, the results show that significant differences really exist, Preliminary indicating that, to some extent, the new Enterprise Income Tax Law do affect the company's actual tax and investment behavior. Again, with the purpose of revealing the relationship between the tax burden and enterprise investment more intuitively, the thesis selects multiple samples and carries on mixed least-squares regression analysis and feasible generalized least squares panel regression analysis. The following conclusions are draw: (1) after the implementation of the new Enterprise Income Tax Law, all sample companies' overall actual tax burden has decreased, which has lead to the companies' investment expansion, and, the results of the group inspection show that, (2) for the companies whose statutory tax rate has risen and fallen respectively during the process of the income tax reform, the same changes have occurred to their actual tax burden, which has brought the opposite direction changes to their investment, what this conclusion suggests is that, the new Enterprise Income Tax Law has influenced sample companies' investment decisions by affecting their actual tax burden and the transmission mechanism of "statutory tax rate - actual tax burden - investment behavior" does exist, (3) for the companies whose statutory tax rate has remained the same during the process of the income tax reform, their actual tax burden hasn't changed too, On the one hand, this shows that the new Enterprise Income Tax Law have not influenced the listed companies' actual tax burden and investment behavior by adjusting and regulating the tax preferential policy, on the other hand, this conclusion has indirectly proved the feasibility of the "statutory tax rate - actual tax burden - investment behavior" transmission mechanism.In order to ensure the reliability of the conclusions, the thesis adopted two different quantitative methods (cluster regression and double-difference regression) to test the robustness of them, and the test results show that all the conclusions above are valid.It has the following innovative points: (1) Basing on the micro-level, the dissertation has conducted the first systematic study of the economic consequences brought about by the new Enterprise Income Tax Law. It concluded that the new Enterprise Income Tax Law affects the actual tax burden of listed companies, and then influences their investment behavior, and verified the effectiveness of the "statutory tax rate - actual tax burden - investment behavior"transmission mechanism. (2) The dissertation also tested empirically the behavior change of the listed companies' investment due to the specification of the preferential tax policy brought by the new Enterprise Income Tax Law, and the result showed that the specification of the preferential tax policy brought no change to the listed companies' investment behavior. These conclusions enrich relevant areas' research results, and put forward instructive suggestions for the further improvment of tax system.