个人控股公司、税收累进性与不平等

中文摘要

长期以来，通过个人控股公司避税一直被视为累进所得税制面临的一项关键挑战。我们利用瑞典和挪威将企业与所有者相匹配的二十年行政微观数据，分析个人控股公司的使用如何随收入分布而变化，并在准实验情境下量化其影响。收入最高的0.1%人群约有一半收入留存在个人控股公司中；按照与美国税法一致的定义，个人控股公司是指由不超过五名所有者持有超过50%股份、且超过60%的收入来自投资收入的企业。针对经营性企业增加值冲击的事件研究表明，控股公司使约一半的股息分配得以规避个人所得税。利润往往长期留存在控股公司中，对于收入最高的群体，二十年间的累计派息率为15%–20%。由于私人企业股份的估值偏低（或享受免税），财富税未能形成有效的补充保障。因此，在计入所有税种后，有效税率从中上阶层的约50%降至最高净值人群的约15%–20%。将控股公司中的收入纳入核算后，1980–2020年北欧国家与美国顶层1%人群财政收入份额增幅上的差异缩小了一半——美国自20世纪30年代以来一直实施惩罚使用控股公司的规则。

Abstract

Tax avoidance through personal holding companies has long been viewed as a key challenge for progressive income taxation. We exploit twenty years of administrative micro-data linking firms to owners in Sweden and Norway to analyze how the use of personal holding companies varies across the income distribution and to quantify its implications in a quasi-experimental setting. About half of the income of the top 0.1% is retained in personal holding companies defined, as in US tax law, as firms for which five or fewer owners own more than 50% of the stock and that derive more than 60% of income from investment income. Event studies of shocks to operational firms’ value-added show that holding companies shield around half of dividend distributions from individual income taxation. Profits tend to remain in holding companies for long periods of time, with cumulative payout rates of 15%–20% over two decades for the highest income groups. Wealth taxes do not provide an effective backstop due to the low valuation (or exemption) of shares in private businesses. As a result, effective tax rates, all taxes included, fall from about 50% for the upper middle class to about 15%–20% among the highest-net-worth individuals. Accounting for income in holding companies erases half of the difference in the 1980–2020 rise of the top 1% fiscal income share between Nordic countries and the United States, where rules penalizing the use of holding companies have been in place since the 1930s.