Taxes on corporate distributions have traditionally been regarded as a quot;double taxquot; on corporate income. This view implies that while the total effective tax rate on corporate source income affects real economic decisions, the distribution of this tax burden between the shareholders and...

This paper overviews the issues connected with proposals to spur investment using tax incentives. There are four main conclusions: (1) The rate of net capital formation in the U.S. has declined very substantially. This decline has been associated with a sharp fall in the after tax return to...

This paper presents an analysis of the effects of tax policy on capital accumulation and valuation based on James Tobin's q theory of investment. As Tobin has explained, aggregate investment can be expected to depend in a stable way on q, the ratio of the stock market valuation of existing...

Using data from the United Nations Comparison Project and the Penn World Table, we find that machinery and equipment investment has a strong association with growth: over l9&)?l95 each percent of GDP invested in equipment is associated with an increase in GDP growth of 1/3 a percentage point per...

This paper uses historicaI U.S. data to directly estimate the contribution of intergenerational transfers to aggregate capital accumulation. The evidence presented indicates that intergenerational transfers account for the vast majority of aggregate U .S. capital formation; only a negligible...

The issue of dynamic efficiency is central to analyses of capital accumulation and economic growth. Yet the question of what operating characteristics of an economy subject to productivity shocks should be examined to determine whether or not it is efficient has not been resolved. This paper...

Published macroeconomic data traditionally exclude most intangible investment from measured GDP. This situation is beginning to change, but our estimates suggest that as much as $800 billion is still excluded from U.S. published data (as of 2003), and that this leads to the exclusion of more...

We extend the conventional neoclassical production and growth framework, with its emphasis on total factor productivity as the primary macroeconomic mechanism of innovation, to allow for technical change that affects consumer welfare directly. Our model is based on Lancaster's “New Approach to...

Incomes per capita have grown dramatically over the past two centuries, but the increase has been unevenly spread across time and across the world. Growth accounting is the principal quantitative tool for understanding this phenomenon, and for assessing the prospects for further increases in...

We show how technical change, measured as a shift in the GDP function, is combined with net income to track welfare change. This provides a bridge between the productivity literature and the welfare-related literature that tends to reason in terms of net product functions: although the relevant...