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Title: Tax Incentives or Political Motivations? Evidence from Corporate Contributions (joint with Agathe Denis, Malka Guillot, Simon Muchardt, and Camille Urvoy).

Here is an abstract
Corporate philanthropy has been increasing in Western democracies in recent decades, a rise often explained by the development of tax policies offering substantial incentives to donate to charities. Yet, corporate philanthropy is also increasingly perceived as a means to influence politics. In this paper, we estimate the tax price elasticity of corporate donations, and investigate how it differs depending on the recipients’ purposes. To do so, we use an exhaustive administrative panel data set on firms’ tax returns in France from 2013 to 2022, including the identity of the charities that benefit from the donations. We exploit two reforms that affect the price of donations for firms. We document significant bunching around two major regulatory thresholds, and show that there is heterogeneity depending on the identity of the beneficiary.