The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and Domestic Corporate Tax Rates

We use a representative sample of US corporate tax returns to study how trends in effective tax rates (ETRs) varied for public, private, multinational, domestic, and large versus small firms following passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). We document several novel facts, including that ETRs increased on average for small private domestic firms after TCJA. Private firms’ pre-TCJA exposure to corporate tax rate and net operating loss changes has the strongest correlations with post-TCJA ETR changes. Our analysis underscores TCJA’s divergent impacts on different firm types and illuminates the relative significance of TCJA’s myriad provisions.