Commentators on the private equity industry often claim that favorable tax treatment gives private equity firms advantages in the market for corporate control. But we show that tax advantages do not affect the equilibrium ownership of corporate assets when acquisition costs are fully deductible...

This paper uses affiliate level data from Swedish multinationals to examine the impact of tax treaties on both overall affiliate sales and the composition of those sales. In line with previous results, we find little evidence for an effect of treaties on the level of total sales. We do, however,...

Firms and governments spend billions of dollars on R&D every year. To increase social welfare, the results of R&D must be commercialized so that consumers can benefit from improved products and lower prices. One measure of R&D output is patents; however, most patent databases contain no...

Globalization, high growth rates in high-tech industries, growing emerging markets and harmonization of patent institutions across countries have stimulated patenting in foreign markets. We use a simple model of international patenting, where the decision to patent in a foreign country depends...

One of the major reasons why inventors are awarded patents by governments is they encourage R&D investments and commercialization of inventions. If the patent holder commercializes his invention, he has stronger incentives to retain the patent. The purpose here is to empirically analyze the...

I apply a survival model to a detailed dataset of Swedish patents to estimate how different factors affect the likelihood of patent renewal. Since the owners know more about the patents than potential external financiers, there is a problem of asymmetric information. To overcome this, Sweden has...

Intellectual property rights and competition policy are intimately related. In this paper I survey the economic literature analyzing the interaction between intellectual property law and competition law and how the boundary between these two policies is drawn in practice. Recognizing that...

I establish a positive relationship between family ties and civic virtues, as captured by disapproval of tax and benefit cheating, corruption, and a range of other dimensions of exploiting others for personal gain. I find that family ties are a complement to social capital, using within country...

Economists and political scientists have long been interested in factors that affect the statutory tax rate on businesses set by federal governments. In this study, we examine the impact of political and economic factors on several measures of tax rates and tax incentives offered across 19...

This paper estimates the role of both tax and non-tax determinants in the choice in Sweden to be a closely-held corporation vs. a proprietorship, using individual data for 2004 to 2008 on owners of closely-held businesses. While lower-income individuals face relatively neutral incentives, higher...