This paper develops and tests the hypothesis that accounting rules mitigate the effect of tax policy on firm investment decisions by obscuring the timing of tax payments. I model a firm that maximizes a discounted weighted average of after-tax cash flows and accounting profits. I estimate the...

This thesis consists of three essays that examine the impact of tax policy on firms' decisions to invest in productive capital. The first chapter uses newly-collected data on transaction prices of used construction machinery to examine the impact and incidence of recent tax incentives for...

Recent years have seen large increases in the prices of houses, farm products, and oil, often with little clear connection to economic fundamentals. These price increases created plausibly exogenous shifts in demand for construction, farm, and mining machinery. This paper uses these demand...

This paper uses novel data to examine the fleets of corporate jets operated by both publicly traded and privately held firms. In the cross-section, firms owned by private equity funds average 40% smaller fleets than observably similar public firms. Similar fleet reductions are observed within...

It is often asserted that the financial crisis of 2008 caused a recession in the real economy by restricting the supply of credit to firms and households, but this view has been questioned by a number of researchers. This paper uses novel data on lending relationships from Uniform Commercial...

This paper develops and tests the hypothesis that accounting rules mitigate the effect of tax policy on firm investment decisions by obscuring the timing of tax payments. I model a firm that maximizes a discounted weighted average of after-tax cash flows and accounting profits. I estimate the...