Andreas Lichter

Corporate Taxation and Innovation

In ongoing work, Andreas Lichter is studying the effect of corporate taxation on firms’ R&D spending and innovation output. To this end, he and his collaborators link municipality-level variation in corporate tax rates across Germany to plant-level data on R&D investment and innovation. Using event study techniques, they find that increases in local tax rates significantly reduce firm-level R&D spending and, with some temporal lag, innovation output.

Mr. Lichter’s work covers topics in Labor Economics, Political Economy and Public Economics. He is currently on sabbatical, visiting the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM) at the Department of Economics of University College London. During his time at CESifo, he will be working with Andreas Peichl on a joint project.

Andreas Lichter has been Assistant Professor of Economics at the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE) of the Economics Faculty of Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf since October 2018. Mr. Lichter was a student assistant, Resident Research Affiliate and Research Associate at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA). He maintains his ties to IZA as a Research Fellow.

Mr. Lichter holds a doctorate (Dr. rer. pol.) in Economics from the University of Cologne. Prior to his doctoral studies, he studied Economics at Trinity College Dublin and at the University of Cologne, the latter awarding him a Masters in Economics (Diplom Volkswirt) in 2011.