Using an agency model of firm behavior, the paper analyzes whether the cost of investment should be tax exempt. The findings suggest that, when managers engage in wasteful capital expenditures, welfare may decline if the cost of investment is tax deductible, as commonly advocated. The extent to...

11 European countries now operate IP Box regimes that provide substantially reduced rates of corporate tax for income derived from important forms of intellectual property. We incorporate these policies into forward-looking measures of the cost of capital, effective marginal tax rates and...

Many countries have introduced patent box regimes in recent years, offering a reduced tax rate to businesses for their IP-related income. In this paper, we analyze the effects of patent box regimes when countries can simultaneously use patent boxes and R&D subsidies to promote innovation. We...

We develop a 2×2×2 model with the following features: (1) one sector is perfectly competitive while the other is oligopolistic; (2) one country has unemployment while the other attains full employment; (3) oligopolists move internationally; and (4) the ownership of each oligopolist is...

We study whether the corporate tax system provides incentives for risky firm investment. We analytically and empirically show two main findings: first, risk-taking is positively related to the length of tax loss periods because the loss rules shift some risk to the government; and second, the...

How can tax policy improve financial stability? Recent studies suggest large stability gains from eliminating the debt bias in corporate taxation. It is well known that this reform reduces bank leverage. This paper analyzes a novel, complementary channel: risk taking. We model banks' portfolio...

We extend Trade-Off Theory (TOT) by assuming that EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization), rather than EBIT (Earnings Before Interest and Taxes), follows a Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM), and we thus consider the role of tax depreciation allowances (TDA) in...

This article discusses the effects of taxation on the discrete choice of alternative projects. In particular, it is shown that if taxation affects the optimal timing of irreversible investment, then the discrete choice is distorted as well. This result has both methodological and political...

We provide a new explanation why effective tax rates are smaller for larger firms even in the absence of common channels like profit shifting and lobbying. This result emerges in a heterogeneous firms model with endogenous mark-ups. Our framework features imperfect tax pass-through into prices...