What is the socially optimal level of liquidity in a retirement savings system? Liquid retirement savings are desirable because liquidity enables agents to flexibly respond to pre-retirement events that raise the marginal utility of consumption. On the other hand, pre-retirement liquidity is...

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...

We consider the short-run responses of businesses and their owners to the introduction of Section 199A, a deduction implemented in 2018 that reduced the effective tax rate on pass-through business income. We study the deduction using several datasets derived from de-identified tax records of...

Puerto Rico operated as a tax haven under U.S. Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 936. Firms in the pharmaceutical industry accounted for approximately 50% of tax credits awarded and 20% of employment under the program. The U.S. Congress eliminated the tax exemption program in 2006, creating a...

The 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act reduced the US corporate tax rate and introduced provisions to curb profit shifting. We combine survey data, tax data, and firm financial statements to study the evolution of the geographical allocation of US firms' profits after the reform. The share of profits...

This paper presents estimates of the tax benefits generated by a sample of U.S. mergers and acquisitions involving two public corporations over the period 1968-83 and estimates a "marriage model" based on differences between these mergers and another sample of "pseudomergers" that did not occur...

Alternative corporate tax systems differ in their ability to adapt to changes in the rate of inflation. Absent complete indexing of depreciation allowances, a tax system may use the expected inflation rate to set accelerated depreciation allowances in a way that minimizes the welfare loss from...

This paper evaluates the effect of U.S. state corporate income taxes on union wages. American workers who belong to unions are paid more than their non-union counterparts, and this difference is greater in low-tax locations, reflecting that unions and employers share tax savings associated with...