This paper examines the extent to which U.S.-based multinational corporations are affected by the alternative minimum tax. More than half of all foreign-source income received by corporations in 1990 was earned by corporations subject to the alternative minimum tax. The AMT rules potentially...

Economists have generally argued that income redistribution comes at a cost in aggregate incomes. We provide a counter-example in a model where private information gives rise to incentive constraints. In the model, a wage tax creates the usual distortion in labor-leisure choices, but the grants...

In this paper we construct measures of tax incidence over the life-cycle and compare these measures to traditional measures based on annual data. We show that annual measures of the incidence of taxes on consumption goods may differ from life-cycle measures for three reasons. First, annual...

Many studies measure capital stocks and effective tax rates for different industries, but they consider only tangible assets such as equipment, structures, inventories, and land. Some of these studies also have estimated that the welfare cost of tax differences among these assets under prior law...

When tax rates vary by asset, a "hidden" industrial policy may aid industries that invest in a certain mix of assets. In this paper, we examine whether differential use of depreciable assets gives rise to differential tax treatment of high technology industries relative to other industries....

Alternative corporate tax systems differ in their ability to adapt to changes in the rate of inflation. Absent complete indexing of depreciation allowances, a tax system may use the expected inflation rate to set accelerated depreciation allowances in a way that minimizes the welfare loss from...

In this paper, we use tax policy choices to illustrate and investigate the more general problem of using uncertain parameter values in models to evaluate policy choices. We show, for this tax example, how debate on an elasticity parameter translates into a debate about policy choices, andvice...

Many studies measure capital stocks and effective tax rates for different industries, but they consider only tangible assets such as equipment, structures, inventories, and land. Some of these studies also have estimated that the welfare cost of tax differences among these assets under prior law...