Corporate largesse: More tax breaks?

Tax Policy and Corporate Borrowing

Aggregate statistics readily indicate why so many observers of financial markets in the United States are concerned about the balance between debt and equity in the corporate financial decision. Exceeding zero in most years before 1984, net equity issues by U.S. nonfinancial corporations have been negative in each year since. Net redemptions averaged approximately $80 billion annually during th...

Externalities of Corporate Tax Avoidance

We show that when a meaningful proportion of firms in an economy engage in tax avoidance strategies, the covariance between a firm’s cash flow and the market cash flows increases, thereby increasing a firm’s cost of capital. This negative externality is imposed on all firms in the economy, not just tax-avoiding firms. The negative externality results regardless of the level of uncertainty assoc...

How do corporate tax bases change when corporate tax rates change? With implications for the tax rate elasticity of corporate tax revenues

We construct a new database of extensive margin changes to multiple aspects of corporate tax bases for OECD countries between 1980 and 2004. We use our data to systematically document the tendency of countries to implement policies that both lower the corporate tax rate and broaden the corporate tax base. This correlation informs our interpretation of previous estimates of the relationship betw...

More Breaks Less Presence

1. Introduction The concept of 'breaks in presence' (BIPs) was introduced in Slater and Steed (2000). The idea was that rather than only use a post-experience questionnaire to assess presence, it could be assessed during the experience itself. The hypothesis was that during immersion in a VE a participant simultaneously perceives two streams of sensory data – from the real world, and also from ...

Corporate Tax Evasion with Agency Costs