Credit spreads are large, volatile, and countercyclical, and recent empirical work suggests that risk premia, not expected credit losses, are responsible for these features. Building on the idea that corporate debt, while fairly safe in ordinary recessions, is exposed to economic depressions,...

To study the long-run effect of dividend taxation on aggregate capital accumulation, we build a dynamic general equilibrium model in which there is a continuum of firms subject to idiosyncratic productivity shocks. We find that a dividend tax cut raises aggregate productivity by reducing the...