Tax Policy Expectations and Investment: Evidence from the 2016 U.S. Election and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act

Abstract

We examine how firms’ tax policy expectations (TPE) evolve around and affect their investment response to a change in tax policy. This examination is motivated, in part, by Hennessy and Strebulaev (2020), who show analytically the importance of accounting for policy expectations in empirical tests purporting to capture the causal impact of a policy change. Using a text-based approach to measuring TPE, we document that two tax-changing events—namely, the 2016 U.S. election and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA)—spawned considerable within-industry and within-year variation in TPE, sometimes going against often-used conventional assumptions in prior research. Furthermore, we observe that event-induced TPE materially affects investment both before and in response to the TCJA’s passage in 2017, with its first and second moments having offsetting effects. Finally, we find that domestic firms differ from multinational firms in their investment response to TPE, with the former (latter) more likely to adjust the level (shift the country location) of their investment. Overall, our findings strongly support the idea that TPE can affect investment behavior around a tax policy change, and suggest that our methodology can be used by future research to study and incorporate TPE into their analysis of tax policy effects.

Keywords: policy expectations, tax policy, tax reform, investment

JEL Classification: D72, G31, G38, H25