We examine the effects of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 on the financial decisions made by firms. We review the theory and empirical predictions of prior literature for corporate debt policy, for dividend and equity repurchase payouts to shareholders, and for the choice of organizational form. We...

Income from corporate and noncorporate firms is treated very differently under the tax law. To what degree do firms change their form of organization in response? Since the relative tax treatment depends on the tax bracket of the investor, the answer will vary by the bracket of the owners. To...

One of the most basic distortions created by the double taxation of corporate income is the disincentive to incorporate. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which the aggregate allocation of assets and taxable income in the U.S. between corporate vs. noncorporate forms of organization...

An intertemporal capital asset valuation approach is applied to analyzing the effects of nonlinear taxes on asset values and optimal investment decisions. The method is quite general, and is illustrated both analytically and numerically, The paper studies the effects of nonlinearities in the...

Several types of evidence are presented to demonstrate that firms are concerned with who provides their financing, not just with the debt/equity distinction. Aggregate and industry trends and patterns in the incremental sources of financial capital are documented, and a large sample of...

We show there is a strong, positive correlation across countries and industries between the standard deviation of the seasonal component and the standard deviation of the non-seasonal component of aggregate variables such as output, labor input, interest rates, and prices. After documenting this...

A new empirical method and data set are used to study the effects of tax policy on corporate financing choices. Clear evidence emerges that non-debt tax shields "crowd out" interest deductibility, thus decreasing the desirability of debt issues at the margin. Previous studies which failed to...

Many recent papers have estimated components of the disturbance term in the "market model" of equity returns. In particular, several studies of regulatory changes and other policy events have decomposed the event effects in order to allow for heterogeneity across firms. In this paper we...

Starting with Vickrey (1945) and Mirrlees (1971), the optimal tax literature has studied the design of a personal income tax. The assumed ideal would be to tax earnings ability. Earnings ability is unobservable for tax purposes, however. Past papers have focused instead on designing a tax on...