Two well-noted phenomena of recent decades are the increasing concentration of personal income and the declining rate of corporate profitability. This paper investigates to what extent these two trends have a common explanation extent these two trends have a common explanation-shifting of income...

This paper extends Merton Miller's 1977 analysis of corporate capital structure decisions to the incomplete capital markets case. As in Miller's model, aggregate demand for corporate leverage is curtailed as interest rates on taxable bonds rise. Unlike Miller's model, however, capital structure...

Does tax code complexity alter corporate behavior? This paper investigates this question by focusing on the decision to claim refunds for tax losses. In a sample of 1.2M observations from the population of corporate tax returns, only 37% of eligible firms claim their refund. A simple...

We study the effects of corporate taxes on income inequality. Using state corporate taxes as a setting, we provide evidence that corporate tax cuts lead to increases in income inequality. This result is robust across regression, matching, and synthetic controls approaches, and to controlling for...

Do corporate tax increases destroy jobs? And do corporate tax cuts boost employment? Answering these questions has proved empirically challenging. We propose an identification strategy that exploits variation in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states. Comparing contiguous counties...

We study the relation between leverage and corporate tax rates using an extensive data set constructed from all corporate income tax returns filed with the IRS from 1926 to 2009. This data set includes financial statement data from millions of private and public corporations of all sizes. We...

Past attempts to measure the impact of taxes on corporate debt policy have focused on larger firms. Given that the top statutory corporate tax rate has varied little in recent years, tax incentives vary among these firms, almost entirely due to current or prospective tax losses. Results are...

This paper documents facts about the structure of business taxation in China using administrative tax data from 2007 to 2011 from the State Taxation Administration. We first document the importance of different business taxes across industries. While corporate income taxes play an important role...

Alternatives to the current system of separate tax accounting, such as the proposed Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base in Europe, would apportion a firm's worldwide profits using formulas based on the location of employment, capital or sales. This paper offers a new method of evaluating the...

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...