Organizational-Form Choice and Tax Incentives: Multi-Country Evidence

We study how differential taxation of personal and corporate income impacts the corporate share of new firms for 31 countries over 1998-2018. We build a novel database that identifies the tax treatment of partnerships either as corporations or as passthrough entities. We find a tax elasticity of 0.07 for the period 1998-2007 and of 0.12 for 2008-2018. Estimates are larger for countries where the presence of partnerships is nonnegligible and where they are treated as passthrough for tax purposes, suggesting that the tax sensitivity of organizational-form choice interacts with the relevance of partnerships and their tax treatment.