In 2014, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation published “Evaluating Firm-Specific Location Incentives: An Application to the Kansas PEAK Program,” by economist Nathan Jensen. The PEAK program is similar to both Michigan’s Transformational Brownfield Plan and Good Jobs for Michigan programs in that it allows select businesses to capture taxes that would normally be paid to the government, including employees’ income taxes.[12] The program allows selected corporations “to keep up to 95 percent of payroll withholding taxes of eligible employees.”[13] Using NETS data and a control group like the one used in this study, Jensen concludes:
The paper’s main finding is that, when comparing firms receiving PEAK incentives to a similar set of “control” firms, PEAK incentives recipients are statistically not more likely to generate new jobs than similar firms not receiving incentives. A secondary set of findings shows that firms relocating to Kansas, with or without incentives, do not experience job growth at higher rates than existing firms.[14]