The Effect of Taxes on the Location of Property-Casualty Insurance Firms
54 Pages Posted: 14 Jun 2018 Last revised: 18 Oct 2018
Date Written: May 30, 2018
Abstract
States levy insurance premium taxes, which are essentially gross receipt taxes on premiums. A very unusual characteristic of insurance premium taxes is that in each state in which an insurance company writes premiums, the firm pays the higher of the tax rate in the state in which the company is domiciled and the state in which the policy is written. Thus, the choice of location has a significant effect on the firm’s tax liability. Using firm-level data for the property-casualty (P-C) insurance industry, we calculate the firm-specific tax rate for each P-C firm for every possible state of domicile. We estimate a conditional logistic model to analyze the effect of these insurance premium taxes on the choice of the state of domicile of existing and relocated firms. We find robust evidence of a small, negative, and statistically significant effect of the insurance premiums tax rate on the choice of the state of domicile.
Keywords: Taxes, Insurance Firms, Firm Location, Conditional Logit Model
JEL Classification: G2, H7, L84, R11
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Martin F. Grace (Contact Author)
Temple University - Risk Management & Insurance & Actuarial Science ( email )
Fox School of Business and Management
1301 Cecil B. Moore Ave.
Philadelphia, PA 19122
United States
David L. Sjoquist
Georgia State University ( email )
P.O. Box 3992
Atlanta, GA 30302-3992
United States
404-413-0246 (Phone)
HOME PAGE: http://frp.aysps.gsu.edu/sjoquist/index.html
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