Like many Canadians, I am dreading the prospect of a federal election. We all have our own reasons for doing so, and here's mine. Now that the Liberals have announced that they - along with the NDP - will oppose the reduction in the corporate income tax rate that is planned for next year's budget, there is the very real possibility that corporate taxes will be an election issue.

Now, I'm as happy as the next person - okay, probably happier than the next person - to talk about corporate income tax policy. What worries me is that the quality of public debate on this topic is likely to be no better than that of the climate change file in the last election. For pretty much the entire 2008 campaign, reporting on climate change policy - with all-too-rare exceptions - took the form of he-said-she-said, opinions-differ-on-the-shape-of-the-earth stories that made no reference to the scholarly literature. By the time academic economists intervened with this open letter a week before the election, it was too late: the damage had already been done.

So I've decided to be pro-active. All too often, I've seen "where is the evidence?" being used as a rhetorical device instead of a signal to do some homework, and I've decided to answer this question in the form of this reading list. I've arranged 40 papers by topic, reproduced their abstracts, and - where possible - provided links to ungated versions.

I'll resist the temptation to offer some sort of literature survey: there are several very good ones in that list. But I will offer some shortcuts for those who are interested in certain aspects of the problem:

Recent OECD studies. The OECD's staff has been very busy on this file over the past few years. Their work is thorough, not-overly-technical and ungated: an excellent starting point for those unfamiliar with the literature.

Empirical studies of corporate tax incidence: The theoretical literature predicts that most or all of the burden of corporate taxes is passed on to workers. Here are five recent empirical studies that demonstrate the point.

The tax mix: It might be argued that since all taxes generate distortions, there's no particular reason to object to corporate taxes. But it turns out that corporate taxes are among the most damaging policy instruments in a government's toolkit. The optimal tax mix is heavy on consumption taxes, light on corporate taxes, and somewhere in between on personal income taxes.

This doesn't exhaust the list I've prepared, and the list represents only a fraction of the literature. But I'm hoping it will be useful.