This paper reviews how the impact of taxes on the incentive to invest in the corporate sector can be measured. The main focus of the paper is to discuss measures derived from economic theory. In empirical work, these tend to be based on the legal parameters of tax regimes, rather than on...

This paper explores the properties of alternative measures of the taxation of income from capital, by applying them to data for the UK over the last thirty years. We consider several types of measures, reflecting both average and marginal rates.

We present empirical evidence which suggests that a big increase in dividend taxation for UK pension funds in July 1997 affected the form in which some UK companies chose to make dividend payments, but otherwise had limited effects on both the level of dividend payments and the level of...

We examine whether discretionary government grants influence the location of new plants, and how effective these incentives are in the presence of agglomeration and urbanisation externalities. We find evidence that regional industrial structure affects the location of new entrants. Firms in more...

We analyse a puzzle in the UK corporation tax: by both historic and international standards corporation tax revenues have been high while the statutory rate has been low. Possible explanations include the following: changes in tax law that may have increased effective tax rates; other factors...

In the wake of the financial crisis, a number of countries have introduced levies on bank borrowing with the aim of reducing risk in the financial sector. This paper studies the behavioral responses to the bank levies and evaluates the policy. We find that the levies induced banks to borrow less...

Following Meade (1978), we reconsider issues in the design of taxes on corporate income. We outline developments in economies and in economic thought over the last thirty years, and investigate how these developments should affect the design of taxes on corporate income. We consider a number of...

We examine the extent to which taxes on corporate income are directly shifted onto the workforce. We use data on 55,082 companies located in nine European countries over the period 1996-2003. We identify this direct shifting through cross-company variation in tax liabilities, conditional on...

This paper investigates whether OECD countries compete with each other over corporation taxes, and whether such competition can explain the fall in statutory tax rates in the 1980s and 1990s. We develop a model in which multinational firms choose their capital stock in response to an effective...