A central issue in public finance is the tradeoff between maintaining tax revenues and using the tax code to incentivize particular economic activities. One important dimension of this tradeoff is whether incentive policies are used in practice as policymakers intend. This paper examines one...

How does wealth taxation differ from capital income taxation? When the return on investment is equal across individuals, a well-known result is that the two tax systems are equivalent. Motivated by recent empirical evidence documenting persistent heterogeneity in rates of return across...

We analyze the dynamic macroeconomic effects of border adjustment taxes, both when they are a feature of corporate tax reform (C-BAT) and for the case of value added taxes (VAT). Our analysis arrives at the following main conclusions. First, C-BAT is unlikely to be neutral at the macroeconomic...

This paper documents facts about the structure of business taxation in China using administrative tax data from 2007 to 2011 from the State Taxation Administration. We first document the importance of different business taxes across industries. While corporate income taxes play an important role...

The Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA) slashed corporations’ median effective tax rates from 31.7% to 20.8%. Nevertheless, 15% of firms experienced an increase. One fifth of firms recorded nonrecurring tax costs or benefits exceeding 3% of total assets. Proxies that existing studies employ to assess...

This paper examines the impact of the 1986 change in U.S. interest allocation rules on the investment and financing decisions of American multinationals. The 1986 change reduced the tax deductibility of the interest expenses of firms with excess foreign tax credits. The resulting increase in the...

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...

This paper analyzes the effects of tax policy on the strategic choices of a domestic multinational company competing with a foreign multinational company in a third country. We demonstrate the role of the effective average tax rate and the effective marginal tax rate on the company's choices. We...