The effect of inheritance taxes on firm investments and growth: Evidence from Norwegian tax reforms

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the effects of the inheritance tax on the ownership structure, investment and sales growth in companies experiencing a family succession. In this investigation, we utilize the natural experiment provided by the Norwegian tax reforms of 2009 and 2014. The reforms enable us to compare family successions with unrelated transfers using a difference-in-difference-indifferences approach. The results show that the inheritance tax does not influence the decision of keeping a firm in the family. As such, the ownership-structure is not influenced. Further, we fail to find that investment and growth changes around succession for companies experiencing a family transfer, as a result of the tax reforms.