Who bears social security taxes?A meta-analysis approach

Resumen

In this paper we apply the meta-regression technique to survey the empirical literature on the economic incidence of social security payroll taxes. In particular, we focus on the effects of taxation on wages, to test the conventional view that employees bear the burden due to lower net wages. Based on 45 empirical papers, we find that temporal fixed effects, key economic institutions, the tax wedge definition, and the temporal focus significantly affect the results. In the long run, workers bear between three quarters of the tax burden in Continental and Anglo-Saxon economies, and the whole tax burden in the Nordic ones. However, despite the numerous set of controlling variables, a significant part of the variability of the empirical literature remains unexplained.