This paper develops a new-Keynesian model with nominal depreciation allowances to consider the effects of temporary tax-based investment incentives on capital spending and real activity. In particular, we investigate the effects of a temporary expensing allowance on investment in partial and...

This paper examines how business investment responded to temporary partial expensing, first enacted in 2002 and expanded in 2003. In principle, partial expensing boosted the incentive to invest which should have had a discernable impact on spending. However, the tax changes did not occur in a...

Standard models of investment usually incorporate various tax factors but often overlook "tax exhaustion," the case when a firm has negative taxable income and cannot claim immediately its tax deductions or credits. However, tax exhausted firms face a higher cost of capital, and evidence shows...

Few economists or laymen would deny that political events can have an important, sometimes even overwhelming, impact on economic decisions in general, and investment decisions in particular. The first goal of this paper was to integrate a number of political and non-traditional economic...

This paper uses a sample of 4,410 firms from 29 countries to investigate the relation between corporate governance and the shareholder base. In contrast to previous work, our results strongly support the notion that poor corporate governance, at both the firm and country level, negatively...

We study the response of investment to changes in uncertainty about future profits. We find that in industries dominated by small firms, an increase in uncertainty about future profits depresses investment; in all other industries, increased uncertainty has virtually no effect (or has a positive...

We analyze a unique data set and uncover a remarkable result that casts a new light on the home bias phenomenon. The data are comprehensive, security-level holdings of emerging market equities by U.S. investors. We document, as expected, that at a point in time U.S. portfolios are tilted towards...

This paper investigates the underlying determinants of home bias using a comprehensive sample of U.S. investor holdings of foreign stocks. We document that U.S. cross-listings are economically important, as U.S. ownership in a foreign firm roughly doubles upon cross-listing in the United States....

Since 2001, foreign investors have acquired roughly $5 trillion in U.S. securities--more than doubling their holdings of U.S. equities and bonds--as both official and private inflows have financed record U.S. current account deficits. Although the rapid growth of foreign holdings of U.S....

We examine an assumption common in empirical work on bilateral portfolio capital flows that the countries the flows are attributed to are also the countries of the security's issuer, seller, or ultimate buyer. We do this by estimating U.S. investors' holdings of debt and equities in over 40...