If firms are indifferent about the timing of dividends, the government's cash flow from taxes on dividends is indeterminate. In an earlier paper, I showed in the context of a world without uncertainty that variations in tax receipts from this source would have no real effects. The extension of...

Dividends seem to be more heavily taxed than capital gains. Why then do corporations pay dividends rather than repurchasing shares or retaining earnings? Either corporations are not acting in the interests of shareholders, or else shareholders desire dividends sufficiently for nontax reasons to...

Federal income tax rules, and especially changes in those rules, combine with financial market circumstances (interest rates) to create incentives bearing on property-casualty insurers' decisions regarding the level of loss reserves to report. These incentives have varied substantially over the...

This paper describes the basic U.S. legal rules that govern the taxation of international transactions and explores the economic policies or principles they reflect. Particular attention is paid to the changes made by the Tax Reform Act of 1986, but it is impossible to understand the 1986 Act...

Although National Income and Product Account (NIPA) saving measures, and especially NIPA saving rates, are widely used in both scholarly and journalistic treatments, they are seriously defective as representations of the variables derived from economic analysis, either for measuring economic...

A cost of capital formula can be a useful tool in estimating the effective tax rate on a dollar of marginal investment in a particular industry. There are a number of procedural issues, however, which can greatly affect the resulting estimates. First, tax rate estimates vary with the interest...

We calculate the incidence of recent changes to the New Jersey state tax system on a sample of homeowners. Our analysis distinguishes between business-as-usual responses to an evolving fiscal situation and tax changes that constitute a surprise. The latter have incidence effects; the former do...

Climate modelers have recognized the possibility of abrupt climate changes caused by a reorganization of the North Atlantic's current pattern (technically known as a thermohaline circulation collapse). This circulation system now warms north-western Europe and transports carbon dioxide to the...

A number of tax reform plans under discussion in the United States would replace the existing hybrid income-based system with a consumption-based system. In this paper I use uniform (single-rate) consumption and income taxes: (a) to explain how the problem of taxing 'old savings' or 'old...

To study the effects of 'double taxation' (first at the corporation level, then at the shareholder level this paper analyzes a model with a tax on all corporate distributions to equity owners and no other taxes. Contrary to the common view, the tax is shown to have no substitution effect and, in...