This paper examines how the effects of dividend taxation on the cost of new equity funds depend on whether or not shareholders can recover their original equity injections without being subject to the dividend tax. We point out the alternative assumptions in the literature on this, and we...

This paper reconsiders the effects of dividend taxation. Particular attention is paid to the form of the “equity trap”, that is, the extent to which cash paid to the shareholders must be taxed as dividends. Our analysis shows that Sinn’s (1991) criticism of the well-known King and...

This paper reconsiders Sinn’s (1991) nucleus theory of the corporation by comparing two different regimes for the equity trap. In the first of these, all cash paid to the shareholders is taxed as dividends, in the second, shareholders are allowed a tax-free return of capital contributed...

When companies finance their investment via the international markets for stocks and bonds, relief from domestic personal taxes on dividends and capital gains will not reduce the cost of capital. Some authors have shown that even for small domestic companies whose shares are not traded...

This paper provides the first estimate of the actuarial balance of the Spanish contributory pension system for the old age contingency, based on official data. The novel entry in the balance sheet, named “Contribution Asset” or “Hidden Asset”, is at the centre of the theoretical...

Many central banks have become more transparent during the last decade, in particular about macroeconomic prospects. This paper shows that such economic transparency could give central banks greater flexibility to respond to macroeconomic shocks. In particular, it allows central banks to...

Using voting data from the Bank of England, we show that different individual assessments of the economy strongly influence votes after controlling for individual policy preferences. We estimate that internal members form more precise assessments than externals and are also more hawkish, though...

The eurozone has a single short-term nominal interest rate, but monetary policy conditions measured by real short-term interest rates varied substantially across countries in the period 2003-2010. We use this cross-country variation in the (local) tightness of monetary policy to examine its...

In a VAR model of the US, the response of the relative price of durables to a monetary contraction is either flat or mildly positive. It significantly falls only if narrowly defined as the ratio between new house and nondurables prices. These findings survive three identification strategies and...