<story><title>Evaluating State and Local Business Tax Incentives [pdf]</title><url>https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/zidar/files/slattery-zidar-taxincentives-2020.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zdragnar</author><text>&amp;gt; While we find some evidence of direct employment gains from attracting a firm, we do not find strong evidence that firm-specific tax incentives increase broader economic growth at the state and local level. Although these incentives are often intended to attract and retain high-spillover firms, the evidence on spillovers and productivity effects of incentives appears mixed.&lt;p&gt;So, would this mean that the study is analogous to a null result being spun to mean a negative result in the title? &amp;quot;We do not find strong evidence&amp;quot; is not the same as &amp;quot;no evidence&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I wonder if this is what would happen should more failure to reproduce papers were published to fix the reproducibility crisis- instead of encouraging more critical analysis, the abstracts will just get summed up into clickbait titles that continue to mislead.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skrebbel</author><text>I do not understand. If you can&amp;#x27;t say &amp;quot;no evidence&amp;quot; when you can&amp;#x27;t find any strong evidence, then when can you? What should the article have concluded to make it OK for them to say &amp;quot;no evidence&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;Is it about the word &amp;quot;strong&amp;quot;? Because the way I understand it, the definition of &amp;quot;strong&amp;quot; in statistical analyses is &amp;quot;couldn&amp;#x27;t reasonably be coincidental&amp;quot;. So then &amp;quot;no strong evidence&amp;quot; means the same as &amp;quot;all evidence we did find was so weak that it might&amp;#x27;ve as well been a coincidence&amp;quot;. I&amp;#x27;m not a scientist, but it seems to me that &amp;quot;no evidence&amp;quot; conveys the right message.&lt;p&gt;I mean, the way I see it, let&amp;#x27;s I see two bees today and three bees tomorrow. This is weak evidence that the bee population is increasing. But &amp;quot;Weak evidence found that bee population is increasing&amp;quot; wouldn&amp;#x27;t be the more honest headline. It&amp;#x27;s no evidence at all, I saw some bees and that&amp;#x27;s it.&lt;p&gt;The way I see it, it&amp;#x27;s great that scientist report null findings and failures to reproduce as &amp;quot;no evidence found&amp;quot;. The general public is not going to interpret &amp;quot;no strong evidence&amp;quot; the way scientists mean it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Evaluating State and Local Business Tax Incentives [pdf]</title><url>https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/zidar/files/slattery-zidar-taxincentives-2020.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zdragnar</author><text>&amp;gt; While we find some evidence of direct employment gains from attracting a firm, we do not find strong evidence that firm-specific tax incentives increase broader economic growth at the state and local level. Although these incentives are often intended to attract and retain high-spillover firms, the evidence on spillovers and productivity effects of incentives appears mixed.&lt;p&gt;So, would this mean that the study is analogous to a null result being spun to mean a negative result in the title? &amp;quot;We do not find strong evidence&amp;quot; is not the same as &amp;quot;no evidence&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I wonder if this is what would happen should more failure to reproduce papers were published to fix the reproducibility crisis- instead of encouraging more critical analysis, the abstracts will just get summed up into clickbait titles that continue to mislead.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Retric</author><text>Not quite, a positive result would need to be obvious to justify spending.  Give away a free factory and the most useful thing to use it for does not change thus the company employees the same number of workers.  It’s a function of cheap capital making infrastructure subsidies really expensive and largely worthless.&lt;p&gt;There is probably some occasional benefit here and there, but that occurs with any kind of spending.  But that’s offset by the usual inefficiency associated with command driven economies.&lt;p&gt;PS: I was personally hopping for the opposite result as these subsides can spread out jobs across the US.</text></comment>