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 analyzes the links between corporate tax avoidance, the growth of high-powered incentives for managers, and the structure of corporate governance. We develop and test a simple model that highlights the role of complementarities between tax sheltering and managerial diversion in...

Switzerland could be considered as a test case for international corporate-tax policy coordination. It is a federation of 26 fiscally autonomous cantons that have been taxing corporate profits more or less independently for over a century. We document and discuss corporate taxation in...

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 examines the extent to which U.S.-based multinational corporations are affected by the alternative minimum tax. More than half of all foreign-source income received by corporations in 1990 was earned by corporations subject to the alternative minimum tax. The AMT rules potentially...

Investors can achieve international diversification in their portfolios not only through purchasing foreign equity directly but also through investing in domestic firms which then invest abroad. Yet these alternative approaches are taxed very differently. A number of countries have also imposed...

Is corporate leverage excessive? Is the tax code distorting corporate capital structure decisions in a way that increases the possibility of an economic crisis owing to "financial instability"? <bR><bR>Answering these kinds of questions first requires some precision in terminology. In this paper, we...

This paper investigates the extent to which loss-offset constraints affect corporate tax incentives. Using data gathered from corporate annual reports, we estimate that in 1984 fifteen percent of the firms in the nonfinancial corporate sector had tax loss carryforwards. When weighted by their...

In his Fisher-Schultz Lecture, Martin Feldstein examined the effects of non-neutral tax rules on business investment by estimating three econometric models, and he concluded that "the rising rate of inflation has, because of the structure of existing U.S. tax rules, substantially discouraged...

This paper examines how corporate taxation of multijurisdictional firms using formula apportionment affects the incentives faced by individual firms and individual states. We find that formula apportionment creates factor price distortions which vary in general among firms within a state, and in...