Short-Term and Long-Term Government Debt and Nonresident Interest Withholding Taxes

This paper examines the incidence of nonresident interest withholding taxes in the international 3-month Treasury-bill market and the international 5-year government bond market.The approach is one of pooled cross-section, time-series regressions.We find that, in general, U.S. dollar yields on national Treasury-bills and pre-tax 5-year government bond yields fully reflect nonresident interest withholding taxes imposed on American or Japanese investors.Nonresident interest withholding taxes on short-term and long-term government debt thus do not appear to be borne by the international investor.