We find that firms located in areas with higher intergenerational mobility are more profitable. Building off the work of Chetty and Hendren (2018a and 2018b)—who provide measures of intergenerational mobility for all commuting zones (essentially, metropolitan areas) within the U.S.—we are...

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act removed the repatriation tax on the accumulated foreign profits of U.S. firms, effective January 1, 2018. Overnight, this unlocked as much as $1.7 trillion in new liquidity for U.S. multinationals. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we examine the real and...

A subscription line of credit (SLC) is debt issued to a private equity fund and used on a continuing basis. Using new data on U.S. buyout funds, we show that when funds use subscription lines of credit they call less capital. We find that funds using SLCs have substantial distortions in...

When multinationals face lower tax rates abroad than in the US, transfer pricing strategies generate an asymmetry in the tax rates on a project's profits and losses. We show that the tax savings from transfer pricing can be expressed as a long position in a call option. We use a model to show...

The official statistics – whether the published aggregates or the confidential microdata – do not support the longstanding view that US direct investment abroad (USDIA) outperforms foreign direct investment in the US (FDIUS). Rather, the apparent yields differential results primarily from...

Using confidential data on the foreign operations of US multinational firms, I examine innovation in the context of an unexpected policy shock that facilitated foreign tax arbitrage. I find that after the shock, US multinationals shifted more of their intellectual property and taxable income to...

We find that firms located in areas with higher intergenerational mobility are more profitable. Building off the work of Chetty and Hendren (2018a and 2018b)—who provide measures of intergenerational mobility for all commuting zones (essentially, metropolitan areas) within the U.S.—we are...

We estimate a dynamic model, featuring agency conflicts and a stochastic tax reform arrival, to evaluate how the change from a worldwide to territorial tax system, enacted under the TCJA, affects foreign investment. Although a worldwide system imposes a higher tax liability on foreign income, we...