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IZA Discussion Paper No. 19040
October 2026
Rent Sharing under Innovation Tax Breaks
Sabien Dobbelaere, Ana Popovici

We study whether firms share gains from innovation tax incentives with incumbent workers and whether such rent sharing is associated with increased worker retention. The Dutch innovation box reduces tax rates on profits from in-house innovation. Linking first-time beneficiaries to matched employer-employee data, we combine nearest-neighbour matching with staggered difference-in-differences. Part of the additional after-tax surplus is passed on to incumbent workers: wages rise by 3.27% on average, with increases of 2.05% for workers least involved in R&D and 4.14% for tertiary-educated STEM workers. Descriptively, treated non-R&D incumbents are 3.47 percentage points less likely to switch employers following treatment.

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Mark Fallak
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World of Labour
Olga Nottmeyer
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+352 585-855-501
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Christina Gathmann
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The IZA@LISER Network is a global community of scholars dedicated to excellence in labor economics and related fields, now coordinated at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) following its transition from Bonn.

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