经济与社会科学2020scholar.princeton.edu
评估州与地方商业税收激励
Evaluating State and Local Business Tax Incentives
入门 · 约 45 分钟读完前置知识：公共财政基础、计量经济学基础
导读
这篇论文（Zidar & Slattery）系统评估了美国州和地方政府给企业的税收优惠是否有效。研究发现，吸引特定企业确实能带来该行业约1500个就业岗位的增加，但没有强有力的证据表明这些针对具体企业的税收优惠能促进更广泛的经济增长，其溢出效应和生产率影响则证据不一。
HN 关注点：提交标题被编辑化（声称“没有证据”），与论文摘要实际报告的“混合结果”不符，引发关于标题党、结果误读和可复现性危机的讨论。
HN 评论精选
这几条评论里：质疑 1 补充 1 亲历 1
版主解释为何改掉编辑化的标题，并批评付费墙导致讨论失焦
原提交标题（“没有证据表明给企业的税收优惠促进了经济增长”）违反了站点规则：除非原标题误导或标题党，否则应使用原标题，不要编辑化。从文章中挑出你认为最重要的细节放进标题也是一种编辑化。想表达观点请发在评论区，这样大家的观点才在同一水平线上竞争。另外文章似乎在硬付费墙后，没人能真正读到，整个讨论只是在对着（被编辑过的）标题反应，这不足以支撑实质性讨论。
dang查看英文原文
The submitted title ('“No evidence” that tax incentives given to companies increased economic growth') broke the site guidelines, which say: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." Cherry-picking the detail you think is most important from an article is a form of editorializing. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, do not do so by cherry-picking a detail to put in the title. Instead, post it is a comment in the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22level%20playing%20field%22&sort=byDate&type=comment Edit: on top of that, it looks like the article is behind a hard paywall, so no one can actually read it. That means the thread is reacting mostly to the title, and mostly to the heavily editorialized title before we changed it. That isn't nearly enough information for a substantive discussion. Please don't make submissions like that to HN. Edit 2: scratch that last point—there's a link to the paper downthread.
亲历亲历者指出经济影响报告常忽略微观瓶颈且由利益相关方委托
这让我想起和一位餐馆老板的对话，他的店靠近一个大型体育场馆开发项目。市政府投入数百万纳税人的资金建场馆，随后发布了许多报告称场馆带来了积极的经济影响，如市中心消费增加等。但报告没有考虑对本地小企业影响重大的“微观”细节：比赛日他的餐馆爆满、不得不拒绝客人，影响员工和体验；但一年只有约15场比赛，淡季的上座率时好时坏。计算大活动带来多少人消费并外推出一个漂亮数字很容易，但餐馆不能只靠每年15个大日子。经济影响报告往往由有商业或政治利益的相关方委托，因此忽略了这类开发带来的瓶颈，而公众大多不懂金融和房地产，却热爱篮球……
save_ferris查看英文原文
This sort of reminds me of a conversation I had with a guy with a stake in a restaurant close to a major sports arena development where I grew up. It totally changed the way I looked at economic impact reports on commercial developments, particularly sports arenas. The city put up millions in taxpayer funds to get the arena built for the local high-profile college basketball team, and numerous reports were published around the positive economic impact of the stadium, citing increased spending around downtown, etc. However, the report failed to account for "micro" details that can have a major impact on local business, like traffic congestion, entertainment capacity, etc. On game days, his restaurant is overcrowded and turning away patrons, which negatively impacts his staff and quality of experience. But there are only 15 or so games per year, and the off-season attractions are hit-or-miss in terms of attendance. And when nothing is going on, business is even more varied. It's relatively easy to calculate how many people come to town for a big event and how much they spend, extrapolating that out to some great figure, but a restaurant can't reasonably rely on ~15 big days per year. Quite often, economic impact reports are commissioned by folks who have business or political interests at stake, thereby overlooking the potential bottlenecks that such developments expose. And because most of the public doesn't understand finance or real estate, and yet they love the basketball team, a more nuanced conversation around the topic is harder to find.
质疑质疑标题把“未找到强证据”曲解为“没有证据”
论文说“我们发现吸引企业有直接就业增长的证据，但没有找到强有力证据表明针对具体企业的税收优惠能促进州和地方层面更广泛的经济增长”。这是否意味着研究其实类似“零结果”却被标题包装成“负面结果”？“没有找到强有力证据”不等于“没有证据”。我担心如果更多复现失败的论文发表，摘要只会被总结成继续误导人的标题党，而不是促进更批判性的分析。
zdragnar查看英文原文
> While we find some evidence of direct employment gains from attracting a firm, we do not find strong evidence that firm-specific tax incentives increase broader economic growth at the state and local level. Although these incentives are often intended to attract and retain high-spillover firms, the evidence on spillovers and productivity effects of incentives appears mixed. So, would this mean that the study is analogous to a null result being spun to mean a negative result in the title? "We do not find strong evidence" is not the same as "no evidence". I wonder if this is what would happen should more failure to reproduce papers were published to fix the reproducibility crisis- instead of encouraging more critical analysis, the abstracts will just get summed up into clickbait titles that continue to mislead.
补充指出论文实际发现就业增长，标题歪曲了研究的混合结论
这类优惠通常并非直接以“促进增长”为前提，而是以“本地就业”为目标——而研究摘要报告“相关交易所处三位数行业内的平均就业增加约1500个岗位”。摘要还报告溢出和生产率效应结果“混合”、对公平的影响“不清楚”。我并不喜欢地方之间竞相给企业定向优惠——这对所有地方来说很可能是零和甚至负和的，且没有更广泛的增长时成本可能过高。但当前编辑化的标题让人以为这项研究完全没发现任何好处，而它实际报告的是混合的结果。
gojomo查看英文原文
Current submission headline: "“no evidence” that tax incentives given to companies increased economic growth" Such incentives usually aren't directly premised on "increased growth", but rather "local jobs" – and the linked study's abstract reports "we find that average employment within the 3-digit industry of the deal increases by roughly 1,500 jobs". The abstract also reports "mixed" results "on spillovers and productivity effects of incentives", and "unclear" effects on "equity". Now, I'm not a fan of such locality-vs-locality targeted-incentive competition – which is likely zero-sum or negative-sum across all localities. And without broader growth, the costs may be too expensive for the narrow employment gains. But the current editorialized, excerpted headline makes it sound like the thrust of this study was to find no benefits at all for such deals, and that's not the mixed story it's actually reporting.
相关资源
从这篇论文所有 HN 讨论帖的全部评论里整理出来的链接。
历次讨论
- 2020Hacker News 讨论帖419 分 · 214 评
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