This paper analyzes the extent to which firms use trade credit to reallocate capital in response to tax incentives. Tax-induced differences in pretax returns encourage the use of trade credit to reallocate capital from firms facing low tax rates to those facing high tax rates. Evidence from the...

This paper analyzes the impact on firm behavior of the Homeland Investment Act of 2004, which provided a one-time tax holiday for the repatriation of foreign earnings by U.S. multinationals. The analysis controls for endogeneity and omitted variable bias by using instruments that identify the...

We use data from the U.S. Treasury corporate tax files for 1984 and 1992 to address two related questions concerning the investment decisions of U.S. multinational corporations. How sensitive are investment location decisions to tax rate differences across countries, and have investment location...

U.S. corporations hold significant amounts of cash on their balance sheets, and these cash holdings have been justified in the existing empirical literature by transaction costs and precautionary motives. An additional explanation, considered in this study, is that U.S. multinational firms hold...

How does rising foreign investment influence domestic economic activity? Firms whose foreign operations grow rapidly exhibit coincident rapid growth of domestic operations, but this pattern alone is inconclusive, as foreign and domestic business activities are jointly determined. This study uses...

Recent data present a puzzle: the ratio of corporate tax losses to positive income was much higher around 2001 than in earlier recessions. Using a comprehensive 1982-2005 sample of U.S. corporation tax returns, we explore a variety of potential explanations for this surge in tax losses, taking...

An open question in the literature on the taxation of multinational corporations is whether repatriation taxes influence whether the profits of foreign subsidiaries are repatriated or reinvested abroad. Theoretical models suggest that dividend remittances should not be influenced by repatriation...

This paper considers the effect of taxation on the location of foreign direct investment (FDI) and taxable income reported by multinational firms with particular attention to the regional dynamics of tax competition and the role of chains of ownership. Confidential affiliate-level data are used...

This paper examines the impact of local tax rates and capital market conditions on the level and composition of borrowing by foreign affiliates of American multinational corporations. The evidence indicates that 10 percent higher local tax rates are associated with 2.8 percent higher debt/asset...

Several investment-repatriation strategies are added to the standard model of a multinational in which an affiliate is located in a low-tax country and is limited to two alternatives: repatriating taxable dividends to the parent or investing in its own real operations. In our model, affiliates...