Recent years have seen large swings in house prices in many countries. Motivated by housing price variations, proposals for taxing capital gains on housing have repeatedly been put forth. The idea seems to be that such taxes would curb the redistribution occurring between those owning houses and...

This paper examines the impact of capital gains taxation on firms’ investment and financing decisions. We develop a real options model in which the timing of investment, the decision to default, and the firm’s capital structure are endogenouslyand jointly determined. Our analysis shows that...

We propose an equity finance model with agency problems and investigate the relationship between dividend taxation and inefficient investments. Contrary to both the old and the new view of dividend taxation, a fall in the dividend tax rate is found to improve corporate governance by increasing...

Sweat equity is investment in a business that is financed by owner-workers being compensated at less than their market rate. Taking into account the hours spent building sweat equity while ignoring the output introduces an error in measured productivity and distorts the picture of what is...

We use newly linked tax records to show that the large responses of UK company owner-managers to personal taxes are due to intertemporal income shifting and not to reductions in real business activity. Around half of this shifting is short-term and helps prevent volatile incomes being taxed more...