The 1986 Tax Act in the U.S. gradually reduced corporate tax rates from 46 percent prior to the Act to 34 percent by the middle of 1988. This reduction gave firms an incentive, in 1986 and 1987, to shift taxable income to future years when tax rates would be lower. There are substantial...

If the intent of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, ERISA, was to assure that beneficiaries of insolvent pension plans receive adequate pension benefits, sharp increases in nominal rates of interest have blunted that purpose. Without an increase in these rates, the Pension Benefit...

The liability to employees in a defined benefit pension plan is the present value of vested benefits, the present value of the benefits that employees would receive on the immediate termination of the pension plan. This is the literal and simple definition of the liability. Although it leads to...

Discount dividend-reinvestment and stock-purchase plans allow shareholders to capture part of the underwriting fees incurred in new stock offerings and save sponsoring firms some of the usual underwriting costs. We tested the degree to which individual investors can profitably serve this...

I was born in Timmins, Ontario, Canada on July 1, 1941. My father had ventured to Timmins, a relatively prosperous gold-mining region, to practice dentistry during the depression. My mother and her uncle established a chain of small department stores in and around Timmins. The death of her uncle...

Interview with Myron S. Scholes at the 3rd Meeting in Economic Sciences in Lindau, Germany, 22 August, 2008. The interviewer is Adam Smith, Editor-in-Chief of Nobelprize.org.