In response to the record-breaking COVID19 recession, many governments have adopted unprecedented fiscal stimuli. While countercyclical fiscal policy is effective in fighting conventional recessions, little is known about the effectiveness of fiscal policy in the current environment with...

We review the evidence on the practice and effects of discretionary fiscal policy, particularly in the context of recent efforts to stimulate the economy, reaching two main conclusions. First, policy interventions have increased in this decade, pre-dating the 2009 stimulus. Second, despite a...

The cost of capital plays an important role in the allocation of resources among competing uses in a decentralized market system. The purpose of this paper is to organize and present what is known and what is hypothesized about the effects of taxation on the incentive to invest, via the cost of...

This paper develops a theoretical model of firm behavior consistent with the maximization of shareholder utility, and derives empirically testable implications of different theories of equity finance. Using data on firm earnings and previous investment and financial behavior, we assess whether...

In this paper we explore the issue of wealth maximization and the implied behavior of the firm, paying particular attention to the results discussed above and how they are affected by the existence of capital income taxes. Our results indicate that a tax structure similar to that in existence in...

(3) Correcting Japanese accounting statements for unmeasured returns to land has a significantly more important effect: the most conservative correction we attempt raises the implied Japanese return to capital to parity with the United States during the mid-1980's

This paper uses financial statement data for large samples of U.S. and Japanese nonfinancial corporations to estimate the return to capital in each country for the period 1967-83. Interpreting these as measures of the cost of capital, we find that the before-tax cost of corporate capital was...

This paper presents evidence about the coats of corporate capital in Japan and the US, for a sample of large companies, and evaluates a variety of hypotheses about why the cost might be lower in Japan.We find that the before-tax return to capital in Japan appears slightly lower than in the U.S....

Firms respond to fluctuations in demand by changing their inventories and their levels of production. The relative magnitudes of the inventory and production responses have important implications for the overall cyclical behavior of the economy. Government policies that affect the costs of...

Credit markets typically freeze in recessions: access to credit declines and the cost of credit increases. A conventional policy response is to rely on monetary tools to saturate financial markets with liquidity. Given limited space for monetary policy in the current economic conditions, we...