We analyse earnings responses to six large payroll tax and income tax reforms in France. Our findings indicate full pass-through to workers when there is a strong and transparent link between contributions and expected benefits. In contrast, employer payroll taxes with no tax-benefit linkage exhibit limited pass-through to workers, while income tax nominally borne by employees show nearly full pass-through. Together with a meta-analysis of the literature, we interpret these results as empirical support for the long-standing hypothesis that tax-benefit linkage matters for the incidence of payroll taxes. In the absence of such linkage, our findings suggest that the individual-level incidence of payroll taxes aligns with their statutory incidence.

In this paper we propose a systematic way of examining the importance of the extensive and the intensive margins of labor supply in order to explain the overall movements in total hours of work over time. We show how informative bounds can be developed on each of these margins. We apply this analysis to the evolution of hours of work in the US, the UK, and France and show that both the extensive and intensive margins matter in explaining changes in total hours.

Boissel and Matray (2022) find that investment increased after 2013 in French firms facing higher dividend taxes. We identify an alteration in the code plotting the event study of the effect of this reform on investment. Using identical data and removing this alteration, we find differential pre-trends between treated and control firms. We also establish that the controls referred to as “size growth,” used in all the difference-in-difference specifications, effectively are controls for lagged investment, i.e., the main outcome variable. Removing such controls attenuates differential pre-trends but leaves no clear event study evidence of a positive effect of dividend taxation on investment.