I believe that every tax-paying firm's defined benefit pension fund portfolio should be invested entirely in bonds (or insurance contracts). Although the firm's pension funds are legally distinct from the firm, there is a close tie between the performance of the pension fund investments and the...

This paper explores how alternative assumptions about household portfolio behavior affect estimates of the revenue cost of excluding state and local government interest payments from the federal income tax base. Standard tax expenditure estimates assume that current holders of tax-exempt bonds...

We empirically document that stock prices moved inversely with dividend yields during the May, 1997 week, when the White House and Congress agreed on a budget accord that included a reduction in the capital gains tax rate. The share prices of firms not currently paying dividends increased...

This working paper presents Chapter 7 of a book to be published for the National Bureau of Economic Research by the University of Chicago Press. The point of the book is to compare taxes on income from capital in four countries,accounting for corporate, personal, and property taxes, and...

This working paper presents Chapter 2 of a book that has been submitted to the University of Chicago Press for publication consideration. The point of the book is to compare taxes on income from capital infour countries,accounting for corporate, personal, and property taxes, and including...

This paper investigates the effects of increased cash dividend payout, and of quot;forced realizations~ of capital gains in corporate control transactions, on the level of aggregate consumption. The results support the proposition that investors respond differently to cash receipts from firms...

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...

The current debate on tax reform has raised again the question of how thecorporate tax system should be altered. The cumulative effect of piecemeal changes to the tax system has been to produce major distortions in thepattern of savings and investment and falling revenue in real terms....

Framing remains one of the pillars of behavioral economics. While framing effects have been found to be quite important in the lab, what is less clear is how well evidence drawn from naturally-occurring settings conforms to received laboratory insights. We use debt obligation to the UK...

We present evidence of a causal impact of research and development (R&D) tax incentives on innovation. We exploit a change in the asset-based size thresholds for eligibility for R&D tax subsidies and implement a Regression Discontinuity Design using administrative tax data on the population of...