Luca Colombo, Paola Labrecciosa and Patrick Paul Walsh

Published February 2006

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Theory predicts that optimal effective corporation tax rates will be negatively related to industry specific sunk costs, and hence industry concentration. Governments should tax industries with monopolistic power softly. Evidence suggests that this Schumpeterian (1942) principle of corporate taxation was used widely across industries in France, Italy and the UK in the 1990s.