One of the fundamental problems of the positive theory of income taxation is explaining why the statutory income tax schedules in all industrialized democracies are marginal-rate progressive. While it is commonly believed that this is but a simple consequence of the fact that the number of...

We extend the literature on the effects of managerial entrenchment to consider how safety-net subsidies and financial distress costs interact with managerial incentives to influence capital structure in U.S. commercial banking. Using cross-sectional data on publicly traded, highest-level U.S....

The U.S. economy had experienced the "jobless recovering" after the 1990-1991 and 2001 recessions, which has been constantly puzzling the economists, market analysts, and policymakers. This paper uses a simple hiring game in an efficiency wage model framework to resolve that puzzle. Our...