How much and over what horizon do households adjust their consumption in response to stock market wealth shocks? We address these questions using granular data on spending and stock portfolios from a large bank and exploiting lottery-like variation in gains across investors with similar...

In 2008, the IRS initiated efforts to curb the use of offshore accounts to evade taxes. This paper uses administrative microdata to examine the impact of the enforcement efforts on taxpayers' reporting of offshore accounts and income. Enforcement caused approximately 60,000 individuals to...

In the wake of the fi?nancial 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 behavioural responses to the bank levies and evaluates the policy. We find that the levies induced banks to borrow...

Corporate tax systems generally maintain a sharp distinction between debt and equity, however, the advent of hybrid instruments has transformed the universe offinancial instruments into a debt-equity continuum and tax systems therefore need to draw lines that distinguish the set of debt...

The rules demarcating debt and equity for tax purposes differ across countries, hence the possibility that a hybrid instrument is treated as equity in one country and debt in another and that a ?rm with foreign investment can combine tax favored dividend income in the home country and tax...

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