Macroeconomic effects of discretionary tax changes in Canada: Evidence from a new narrative measure of tax shocks

In this paper we study the macroeconomic effects of changes in federal taxes for the Canadian economy for the time period 1961–2014. We document all legislated tax changes and the motivations behind them. We then employ the narrative methodology of Romer and Romer (2010) and Cloyne (2013) to identify exogenous changes in federal taxes. Our main empirical result shows that a tax cut of 1% of GDP leads to an increase in GDP of 2.1% on impact and a peak increase of 2.68% after three quarters of the initial shock. Disaggregated analysis shows that the response of output is driven by consumption and investment. We also find changes in personal income and other (sales and production) taxes to have strong effects on output.