Abstract:Since the first U.S. state adopted the Research and Development (R&D) tax credit in the early 1980s, the policy has spread to most of the other states. The diffusion continues with numerous modifications and enhancements to the basic R&D tax credit. This study examines the diffusion of the R&D investment tax credit using event history analysis supported by qualitative research. The conclusions of the research are that the R&D tax credit is an economic development approach associated with an existing manufactur… Show more
“…Not only could states “learn” from the experiences of others, but also the enactment of DC accounts in a neighboring state could help policy makers justify the proposal to the public—and to public employees. While the geographic proximity of states does not drive all new policy adoptions (Miller and Richard ; Mintrom and Vergari ), proximate states often exhibit congruent policy preferences (Bowman ; Gray ), and enactments in one state can lead to policy learning in one or more neighbors (Case, Hines, and Rosen ; Seljan and Weller ; Stream ), a process that may be affected by policy makers’ ideology (Grossback, Nicholson‐Crotty, and Peterson ). As a result of growing interconnectedness across governments, there is a declining belief that contagion effects are as strong today as they were previously (Shipan and Volden ); however, this study's time frame extends back to the mid‐1990s, and it is useful to seek evidence of peer‐driven enactments.Theoretically, the probability of DC account enactment increases in a particular state if a neighboring state has already pursued the accounts.…”
Recent confl icts over public sector defi ned benefi t pension funding have inspired polarized debates about the need for reform, including the utility of replacing pensions with defi ned contribution accounts, which are popular throughout the private sector. Between 1996 and 2011, 15 American states enacted legislation to implement either mandatory or optional defi ned contribution accounts for certain public employees. What drove this process? Th is article investigates the role of political, budgetary, and contagion infl uences on the diff usion of defi ned contribution accounts for general state employees. Empirical results suggest that enactments were infl uenced by Republican legislative, but not executive, partisanship. Gains in state indebtedness also increased the likelihood of enactment independent of political and other factors. Th ere is no evidence of policy learning based on neighboring state activity and no infl uence from two measures of organized labor power. Both quantitative and qualitative robustness checks largely reinforce these fi ndings.
“…Not only could states “learn” from the experiences of others, but also the enactment of DC accounts in a neighboring state could help policy makers justify the proposal to the public—and to public employees. While the geographic proximity of states does not drive all new policy adoptions (Miller and Richard ; Mintrom and Vergari ), proximate states often exhibit congruent policy preferences (Bowman ; Gray ), and enactments in one state can lead to policy learning in one or more neighbors (Case, Hines, and Rosen ; Seljan and Weller ; Stream ), a process that may be affected by policy makers’ ideology (Grossback, Nicholson‐Crotty, and Peterson ). As a result of growing interconnectedness across governments, there is a declining belief that contagion effects are as strong today as they were previously (Shipan and Volden ); however, this study's time frame extends back to the mid‐1990s, and it is useful to seek evidence of peer‐driven enactments.Theoretically, the probability of DC account enactment increases in a particular state if a neighboring state has already pursued the accounts.…”
Recent confl icts over public sector defi ned benefi t pension funding have inspired polarized debates about the need for reform, including the utility of replacing pensions with defi ned contribution accounts, which are popular throughout the private sector. Between 1996 and 2011, 15 American states enacted legislation to implement either mandatory or optional defi ned contribution accounts for certain public employees. What drove this process? Th is article investigates the role of political, budgetary, and contagion infl uences on the diff usion of defi ned contribution accounts for general state employees. Empirical results suggest that enactments were infl uenced by Republican legislative, but not executive, partisanship. Gains in state indebtedness also increased the likelihood of enactment independent of political and other factors. Th ere is no evidence of policy learning based on neighboring state activity and no infl uence from two measures of organized labor power. Both quantitative and qualitative robustness checks largely reinforce these fi ndings.
“…Although these experiments did not involve government employees in the workplace, their findings resonate with the cue‐taking, cooperative, and competitive behaviors that characterize policy decisions in state and local government (Baybeck, Berry, and Siegel ; Miller and Richard ). Furthermore, in the context of reactive transparency, governments—especially those that are subject to the same set of sunshine laws—often look to one another's decisions to assess legal precedence, as well as to evaluate the potential costs and benefits (e.g., Pasquier and Villeneuve ; Wang and Van Wart ) associated with request fulfillment.…”
Section: Peer Conformity In Reactive Transparencymentioning
Sunshine laws establishing government transparency are ubiquitous in the United States; however, the intended degree of openness is often unclear or unrealized. Although researchers have identified characteristics of government organizations or officials that affect the fulfillment of public records requests, they have not considered the influence that government organizations have on one another. This picture of independently acting organizations does not accord with the literature on diffusion in public policy and administration. This article presents a field experiment testing whether a county government ' s fulfillment of a public records request is influenced by the knowledge that its peers have already complied. The authors propose that knowledge of peer compliance should induce competitive pressures to comply and resolve legal ambiguity in favor of compliance. Findings indicate peer conformity affects both in the time to initial response and in the rate of complete request fulfillment.
Practitioner Points• Transparency advocates should publicize instances of public records releases in order to induce pressure on government organizations to conform. • When requesting records from multiple organizations, requesters should use a sequential process in which new requests indicate prior instances of fulfillment. • When requesting records from multiple organizations, requesters should experiment with their choice of words in order to identify the most effective wording. Hanna Wallach is senior researcher at Microsoft and adjunct associate professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research is in the interdisciplinary field of computational social science. In collaboration with political scientists, sociologists, and journalists, she develops new machine learning methods for studying the structure, content, and dynamics of social processes.
Because policymakers may consider the state of the economy when setting taxes, endogeneity bias can arise in regression models that estimate relationships between economic variables and taxes. This paper quantifies the policy endogeneity bias and estimates the impact of R&D tax incentives on R&D expenditures at the U.S. state level. Identifying tax variation comes from changes in federal corporate tax laws that heterogeneously impact state-level R&D tax incentives due to the simultaneity of state and federal corporate taxes. With this exogenous variation, my preferred estimates indicate a 1% increase in R&D tax incentives leads to a 2.8-3.8% increase in R&D. Alternatively, estimates that ignore endogenously determined policies indicate that a 1% increase in R&D tax incentives leads to a 0.4-0.7% increase in R&D. These results are consistent with tax policies that are implemented before an economic downturn.
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