Corporate Tax Reform and Wages:
Theory and Evidence

The Council of Economic Advisers
October 2017
September 29, 2017

 Executive Summary
October 2017
Wage growth in America has stagnated. Over the past eight years, the real median wage in
the U.S. rose by an average of six-tenths of a percent per year. But even as Americans’ real
wages stagnated, real corporate profits soared, increasing by an average of 11 percent per
year. The relationship between corporate profits and worker compensation broke down in
the late 1980s. Prior to 1990, worker wages rose by more than 1 percent for every 1 percent
increase in corporate profits. From 1990-2016, the pass-through to workers was only 0.6
percent, and looking most recently, from 2008-2016, only 0.3 percent.1 The profits of U.S.
multinationals are still American profits, but, increasingly, the benefits of those profits do not
accrue to U.S. workers.
The deteriorating relationship between wages of American workers and U.S. corporate profits
reflects the state of international tax competition. The problem is not unique to America;
countries around the world have responded to the international flow of capital by cutting
their corporate tax rates to attract capital back from other countries. They have doubled
down on such policies as they have seen business-friendly policies benefit workers.
This analysis from the Council of Economic Advisers reviews the evidence that has driven
other developed countries to pursue the path of lower corporate tax rates and estimates how
business tax reform in the Unified Framework for Fixing Our Broken Tax Code2 (hereafter, the
“Unified Framework”) is expected to affect wages for American workers.
Reducing the statutory federal corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent would, the analysis
below suggests, increase average household income in the United States by, very
conservatively, $4,000 annually. The increases recur each year, and the estimated total value
of corporate tax reform for the average U.S. household is therefore substantially higher than
$4,000. Moreover, the broad range of results in the literature suggest that over a decade, this
effect could be much larger.
These conclusions are driven by empirical patterns that are highly visible in the data, in
addition to an extensive peer-reviewed research. While much of the academic literature
predates the latest data, the covariation between the trajectory of inflation-adjusted wages
                                                        
1

 Results from a regression of total labor compensation in the U.S. on corporate profits from BEA data covering
1966-2016. A Wald test supremum trend break occurs in Q4 1989.
2
U.S. Treasury (2017), also available at
https://waysandmeansforms.house.gov/uploadedfiles/tax_framework.pdf

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 and statutory corporate tax rates (Federal and sub-Federal) between the most-taxed and
least-taxed developed countries (OECD) over recent years, visible in Figure 1, is indicative of
these papers’ findings. Between 2012 and 2016, the 10 lowest corporate tax countries of the
OECD had corporate tax rates 13.9 percentage points lower than the 10 highest corporate tax
countries, about the same scale as the reduction currently under consideration in the U.S.
The average wage growth in the low tax countries has been dramatically higher, as would
have been predicted by a consumer of the academic literature, which looks at much longer
time periods and explores the relationship with modern econometric techniques.
This sizable empirical literature measures the relationship between wages and corporate
taxes, controlling for other variables that may affect wage growth across countries and over
time. The literature suggests the relationship between corporate taxes and wages is more
than observational and is econometrically robust. The remainder of this report explains the
theory and the empirical regularities that relate lower business tax rates – such as those in
the Unified Framework – to higher wages and uses these estimates to measure the likely
wage effects of the business tax reforms of the Unified Framework.
Figure 1. Wage Growth in Developed Countries:
Lowest vs. Highest Corporate Tax Countries
(Year-over-year change)

5%
Lowest statutory
corporate rate
countries (bottom 10)

4%

3%

2%
Highest statutory
corporate rate
countries (top 10)

1%

0%
2013

2014

2015

2016

Note: Wage data show year-over-year percent changes in 2016 constant prices at 2016 USD PPPs. Wage growth
measures are the unweighted average over the ten countries.

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 1. Introduction
An extensive literature on corporate tax policy documents that reducing the corporate tax
rate results in increased capital formation and economic output. Effectively, reductions in the
corporate tax rate incentivize corporations to pursue additional capital investments as their
cost declines. Complementarities between labor and capital then imply that the demand for
labor rises under capital deepening and labor becomes more productive.
Standard economic theory implies that the result of more productive and more sought-after
labor is an increase in the price of labor, or worker wages. Indeed, considerable academic
research indicates that this is the case; to summarize, the literature finds that worker wages
are lower when corporate taxes are higher. Capital deepening, which brings additional
returns to the owners of capital, brings returns to workers as well.
Although the wage effects for workers may theoretically differ across the skill distribution,
recent research finds that corporate tax reductions serve to raise wages of both low- and
high-skilled workers (Felix, 2007). Thus, reductions in the corporate tax rate may offer a
potent solution to the tepid wage growth experienced by U.S. workers over the past several
years.
We use a variety of estimates from the academic literature on corporate tax policy and wages
to project the effects of a reduction in the statutory Federal corporate income tax rate from
35 percent to 20 percent. (We know of no literature on the relationship between worker
wages and the introduction of immediate full expensing of capital investment excluding
structures, although in theory this should further increase the productivity of labor and also
increase the wages of workers.) Using conservative estimates from the academic literature on
wages and corporate taxes, we estimate that corporate tax reductions of the Unified
Framework, in their entirety, would in the medium term boost average U.S. household
income annually in current dollars by at least $4,000, conservatively. When we use the more
optimistic estimates from the literature, wage boosts are over $9,000 for the average U.S.
household.
An additional potential benefit of corporate tax reform is its estimated effect on the behavior
of U.S. firms holding profits overseas. The share of foreign-earned profits repatriated to the
U.S. has declined over time along with the tax rates of OECD members and other countries,
and in 2016, U.S. firms chose not to repatriate more than 70 percent of foreign-earned
income. As a result, $299 billion in U.S. corporate profits remained offshore in that year,
unable to benefit U.S. workers. The volume of profits held by U.S. firms abroad has risen
sharply in recent years. A lower rate would provide incentive for firms to move their income

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 and activity back to the U.S. These additional considerations magnify the potential impact of
corporate tax reform for workers’ wages.

2. Corporate Taxes and Worker Wages: Theory and Evidence
The productivity of workers in an economy depends, in part, on the flow of capital services
enabling their production. Even in a closed economy, reductions in the corporate tax rates and
the associated capital deepening may imply a higher marginal product of labor and higher
wages. The ability of domestic U.S. firms to invest foreign profits overseas exacerbates the
implications of corporate tax policy for domestic workers; an uncompetitive domestic
corporate tax rate reduces the demand for U.S. workers by encouraging capital formation
abroad. Indeed, when viewed in this way, the incidence of the corporate tax could theoretically
fall entirely on U.S. workers, so long as workers are immobile and capital moves freely across
borders.
How much of the corporate tax burden do workers bear? Empirical estimates differ but largely
trend upward over time as estimates have caught up with the pace of global capital flows,
whose rise substantially influences these calculations. An earlier literature argued that the
incidence of corporate tax fell entirely on the owners of capital (Harberger, 1962). But
Harberger’s model was based on a closed economy with no ability for capital to move
overseas, perhaps a reasonable contemporary assumption but less apt today.
A newer literature places the labor share of the corporate tax burden decidedly above zero
based on model calibrations under various assumptions that account directly or indirectly for
the fact that capital is much more mobile than labor. Arulpalapam et al (2012) find that workers
pay nearly 50 percent of the tax, while Desai et al (2007) estimate a worker share of 45 to 75
percent. Gravelle and Smetters (2006) generate a rate of 21 percent when the rate of capital
mobility across countries is moderate and 73 percent when capital can flow freely, evidence
that the labor incidence is likely both dynamic and positively correlated with the rate of
international capital transfers. A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study (Randolph, 2006)
finds that workers bear 70 percent of the corporate income tax burden in the baseline and 59
to 91 percent in alternative specifications. In a summary study, Jensen and Mathur (2011)
argue for an assumption of greater than 50 percent. As a result of these more recent estimates,
evaluators have upgraded their estimates of the worker incidence of corporate taxes.
Intuitively, these estimates make sense because capital is far more mobile than labor. The idea
that immobile factors bear a disproportionate share of taxes relative to mobile factors is
almost as old as economics itself.

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 In addition to estimates of the incidence of the corporate tax, a recent empirical literature
measures the relationship between corporate tax rates and worker wages directly. These
estimates generally rely on cross-sectional differences in tax rates across states and countries,
as well as within-country changes over time, to identify the impact of corporate tax rates on
worker wages. The resulting elasticities of average wages with respect to corporate tax rates
allow us to calculate the wage implications of the Unified Framework directly without making
any additional revenue or capital return assumptions.
The measured elasticities of average wages to the top corporate tax rate range from -1.0 to 0.1 in these studies, implying that a 1 percent change in corporate tax rates reduce worker
wages by as much as 1 percent and as little as 0.1 percent. A cross-country study by Hassett
and Mathur (2006) based on 65 countries and 25 years of data finds that the elasticity of worker
wages in manufacturing after five years with respect to the highest marginal tax rate in a
country is as low as -1.0 in some specifications, although other sets of control variables
increase the elasticity to -0.3.
Expanded analysis by Felix (2007) follows the Hassett and Mathur strategy, but incorporates
additional control variables, including worker education levels. Felix settles on an elasticity of
worker wages with respect to corporate income taxes of -0.4, at the high end of the Hassett and
Mathur range. Felix’s study is also able to analyze distributional effects, finding no difference
in the effects of corporate taxes for low-, medium-, and high-skilled workers as proxied by
education levels.
Felix (2009) estimates an elasticity of worker wages with respect to corporate income tax rates
based on variation in the marginal tax rate across U.S. states. In this case, the elasticity is
substantially lower; a 1 percentage point increase in the top marginal state corporate rate
reduces gross wages by 0.14 to 0.36 percent over the entire period (1977-2005) and by up to
0.45 percent for the most recent period in her data (2000-2005). The estimates in Felix (2009)
imply an elasticity of roughly -0.1 to -0.2. These rates, which may be higher than estimates
based on cross-country variation due to the greater mobility of labor across states relative to
countries, again confirm the idea that the mobility of a factor influences the extent to which it
bears a tax.
In addition to estimating the incidence of the corporate tax, Desai et al (2007) also report
estimates of worker wage effects of corporate tax rates. Whereas other papers mentioned
above have used the country as the unit of analysis, the sample in this paper consists of
individual U.S. employers along with their activities in 50 countries over 15 years. With these
data, the authors measure both the changes in worker wages and changes in capital income
associated with corporate income tax changes. The estimated labor burden of the corporate
tax rate varies from 45 to 75 percent under various specifications in the paper. For a panel data
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 specification with country fixed effects, 57 percent of the burden of the corporate tax rate falls
on labor. Applying the coefficient estimates to the U.S. corporate rate implies worker wages
fall by approximately 0.3 percent for every 1 percent increase in the corporate tax rate.

3. Estimating the Effects of a 20 Percent Corporate Tax Rate
The reduced-form estimates of the elasticity of wages with respect to corporate tax rates
discussed above suggest U.S. workers would experience substantial wage increases due to a
reduction of the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent. (Again, there is no simple way to
measure the effects of full expensing on worker wages.) A conservative range of wage
increases can be anchored by a lower bound based on cross-state estimation from 2000-2005
in Felix (2009) and an upper bound based on country panel results of Desai et al (2007),
reflecting an elasticity of wages with respect to corporate taxes of
-0.16 and -0.33, respectively. These wage effects are long-run outcomes and should be
thought of as the recurring flow of income after the corporate tax changes have fully taken
hold, since the identification relies on cross sectional variation in tax rates.
Using 2016 household income as the baseline, these effects translate into an increase in
average household income from $83,143 in 2016 to between $87,520 and $92,222, an increase
of $4,000 to $9,000 in wage and salary income alone. (See Figure 2.) For households at the
median, the effects would bring household income from $59,039 in 2016 to between $62,147
and $65,486, for a boost of between $3,000 and $7,000.3 These are the long-run, recurring
values measured in 2016 dollars; households would receive these benefits each year once the
changes in the corporate tax have been fully absorbed by the economy. As a result, the net
present value (NPV) of these household income flows, the exact value of which depends on
the speed at which reforms are adopted, will be substantially higher than the annual flow.

                                                        
These estimates apply the wage growth implied by the papers’ point estimates to wage and salary income
only. On average, 78 percent of household income in 2016 was wage and salary income; another 11.5 percent
was Social Security and other retirement, and 6.4 percent was self-employment income. The remaining 4.5
percent was comprised of various sources, including dividend and other investment income. Results from the
Current Population Survey ASEC (2016) indicate households near the median income level have a similar share
of wage and salary income.
3

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 Figure 2. Estimated Increases in Average Household Income under the
Corporate Tax Proposal of the Unified Framework ($2016)
$9,000

$4,000

Lower Bound Following
Corporate Tax Reform

Upper Bound Following
Corporate Tax Reform

Source: Census Current Population Survey; CEA calculations

Another way of looking at the benefits for U.S. households is to measure changes in the
growth rate of real wages. For context, the growth rate of real worker wages in the U.S. has
been decidedly slow for several years. In the 8-year span between 2008 and 2016, median real
household income in the U.S. rose by 0.6 percent per year while the average household saw
real increases of 1.1 percent per year. To measure the counterfactual rate of income growth
without having to project counterfactual wage growth, we assume the income boosts in the
previous paragraph (and in Figure 2) phased in over 8 years for a corporate tax reduction that
was passed in 2008. This would imply a counterfactual rate of growth of 2.0 percent per year
for the median household and 2.4 percent per year for the average household. This is a more
than three-fold increase in annual wage growth for the median household and a more than
two-fold increase for the average household.
These wage growth estimates are consistent with the evolution of wages in OECD countries.
For developed countries, lower corporate tax rates correspond to higher rates of wage
growth, as evidenced in Figure 1. Between 2012 and 2016, the average gap in annual wage
growth between the highest and lowest corporate tax countries was 2.0 percent per year. At
the same time, the difference in the average statutory corporate tax rate between these
groups of countries was 14 percent, almost exactly the reduction in the corporate tax rate
proposed in the Unified Framework. With additional wage growth of 2.0 percent per year, the
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 average U.S. household would earn more than $4,000 in additional annual wage and salary
income by Year 4 and $9,000 in additional annual wage and salary income by Year 7.4
Finally, estimated household income gains from the Unified Framework are consistent with
those provided by Auerbach et al (2017) and in Benzell et al (2017) in their evaluation of the
House of Representatives’ “Better Way” proposal, which also carries a corporate tax rate
reduction to 20 percent. Estimated wage effects in these studies are on the order of 8 to 9
percent, implying average household income of more than $5,100 annually above the
baseline level. Thus, the impact suggested by the empirical literature is highly consistent
with predictions of theoretical models, increasing our confidence that these effects are real.

4. The Impacts of Profit Shifting
One increasingly apparent implication of uncompetitive U.S. tax rates is the volume of
activity large multinational U.S. firms attribute to foreign affiliates. Figure 3 shows how the
share of U.S. multinational profits that appear to originate abroad has changed since 1984.
Although there is some variation over time (the large dip in 2005 was due to a temporary tax
holiday whereby firms were able to bring back earnings to the U.S. at a lower rate), the share
exhibits an overall upward trend. In 1984, the three-year moving average was 42 percent of
total foreign profits; by 2016, it had reached 70 percent.

                                                        
OECD data extending back to 2000 tell a similar story; wage growth differences are 1.8 percent per year
between the highest and lowest corporate tax countries between 2000 and 2016 and the average statutory
corporate tax rate difference was 16 percent over this period.
4

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 Figure 3. Percent of Overseas Profits of U.S.-Based Multinationals
Invested Abroad (three-year moving average)
(Percent)

80%

60%

40%

20%

0%
1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016
Source: BEA International Data; CEA calculations

Firms’ tendency to engage in profit shifting is highly responsive to tax rate differentials. Hines
and Rice (1994), using aggregate country-level data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis,
estimate a tax semi-elasticity of profit shifting of -2.25, indicating that a 1 percentage point
increase in the statutory home corporate tax rate results in 2.25 percent higher profit shifting
to lower-tax jurisdictions.5 Applying Hines and Rice’s (1994) findings to a statutory corporate
rate reduction of 15 percentage points (from 35 to 20 percent) suggests that reduced profit
shifting would result in more than $140 billion of repatriated profit based on 2016 numbers.
The assumption that U.S. workers would retain 30 percent of the 2016 profits of U.S. firms
earned abroad and not currently repatriated implies a raise for the average U.S. household of
up to 1 percent, depending on the share of profits repatriated. (See Kline et al 2017 for an
example of workers capturing 29 percent of firm operating surplus.) The trajectory of foreign
profits evidenced in Figure 3 indicates the value to U.S. workers of these profit shifts would
increase in the future. Household income boosts from this channel may be additive to the
                                                        
Subsequent papers to Hines and Rice (1994) make use of firm level micro data and estimate smaller semielasticities. The consensus semi-elasticity estimate from these studies is 0.8 (see Dharmapala (2014) for a survey),
or about one-third the size of the estimate from Hines and Rice. More recently, Clausing (2016) argues that the
firm level approach “over controls” for too many firm specific factors and has advocated a return to the aggregate
country level approach.
5

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 estimated $4,000 in household income discussed in Section 3, as the empirical literature in
Section 3 is largely based on countries and time periods with less foreign profit activity, and
less existing capital parked overseas as taxes changed.
In general, profits earned abroad evidence the willingness of U.S. firms to invest in
production and business operations overseas, at the expense of domestic investment.
Reductions in the corporate rate create an opportunity for U.S. firms to increase domestic
investment instead. Further, these multinationals are among the class of high-paying
employers in the United States. As Krueger and Summers (1987) noted in the early literature
on inter-industry wage differentials for seemingly similar workers, “[m]ore profitable
industries tend to use some of their rents to hire better quality labor, and share some of their
rents with their workers.” A more recent literature on intra-industry wage differentials
confirms that rent-sharing remains a feature of the U.S. labor market (Barth et al, 2016; Card
et al, 2016; Song et al, 2015). Successfully incentivizing these high-paying firms to perform
more of their operations in the U.S. is again constructive for U.S. wage growth.

5. Conclusions
In the foregoing analysis, we have pointed to a range of empirical studies demonstrating that
reductions in corporate tax rates have substantial effects on wages. By inducing higher
capital investment, reductions in corporate tax rates increase the demand for workers and
heighten their productivity. Using estimates from the taxes and wages literature, we calculate
the change in worker wages resulting from corporate rate reductions espoused in the Unified
Framework. Conservative estimates from the literature imply an increase in average
household income of $4,000 and more moderate estimates show increases of $9,000. Put
simply, capital deepening, which brings additional returns to the owners of capital, brings
substantial returns to workers as well.
 

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Auerbach, A., Kotlikoff, L., and Koehler, D. 2017. “Assessing the House Republicans’ “A Better
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 ABOUT THE COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISERS
The Council of Economic Advisers, an agency within the Executive Office of
the President, is charged with offering the President objective economic
advice on the formulation of both domestic and international economic
policy. The Council bases its recommendations and analysis on economic
research and empirical evidence, using the best data available to support
the President in setting our nation's economic policy.
www.whitehouse.gov/cea
 
October 2017