Prices are set by supply and demand. Taxing corporate profits offsets the supply curve, resulting in higher prices. The data supports this.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27058/w270...
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27058/w270...
"A one percentage point increase in a state-level corporate tax rate leads to an increase in affected retail prices of approximately 0.24 percent." is much less strong of an affect than, say, tariffs.
They also say "Pass-through is larger for products purchased by high-income households, higher priced goods, and in less competitive markets.", which makes it seem like corporate taxes might still be highly progressive even with pass-through.
Saving this paper in my references folder.
Reducing corporate taxes also appears to reduce what is paid to labour:
> From 2010 to 2013, the Chinese central government cut the corporate income tax rate in 21 cities for service firms whose revenue from outsourcing services offshore surpassed half of their total revenue. Leveraging a regression discontinuity design with proprietary administrative data, we find that a one percentage point decrease in the statutory corporate income tax rate induces a one percentage point decrease in the firm-level labor share. Firms respond to the tax cut by increasing their physical capital and bank borrowing while keeping their employment unchanged, consistent with a capital deepening process documented in recent theoretical models. Our results suggest that falling corporate income taxes could have contributed to the global decline in the labor share. […] Labor share is defined as the share of gross value-added paid to labor and can be measured at the level of the firm or the economy.
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...