We find support for two key predictions of an agency theory of unproductive corporate social responsibility. First, increasing managerial ownership decreases measures of firm goodness. We use the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut to increase after-tax insider ownership. Firms with moderate levels of insider...

This thesis consists of three independent chapters. The first chapter addresses the question how taxes in the financial sector affect the real economy. One set of results concerns the tax burden: Given a fixed public budget and positive equilibrium profits, one can shift the tax burden from...