TY - RPRT AU - Winter, Richard AU - Doerrenberg, Philipp AU - Eble, Fabian AU - Rostam-Afschar, Davud AU - Voget, Johannes TI - The Asymmetric Incidence of Business Taxes: Survey Evidence from German Firms PY - 2025/Jul/ PB - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) CY - Bonn T2 - IZA Discussion Paper IS - 17983 UR - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp17983 AB - We provide novel evidence on the incidence of business taxes using comprehensive survey and experimental data from German firms. Leveraging randomized variation in hypothetical tax changes, we find that the incidence of profit taxes is highly asymmetric. Tax decreases are more likely to benefit workers and stimulate investment, whereas tax increases tend to be passed on to consumers through higher prices and absorbed by firm owners through reduced profit distributions. Moreover, by varying the magnitude of the tax changes, we demonstrate that worker incidence increases with the absolute size of the tax change, partially offsetting the burden on firm owners. KW - investment KW - firm behavior KW - tax incidence KW - corporate tax KW - payout KW - wages ER -