We propose graphical methods to determine whether commodity-tax changes are “socially efficient”, in the sense of improving social welfare or decreasing poverty for large classes of social welfare and poverty indices. We also derive estimators of critical poverty lines and economic efficiency ratios which can be used to characterize socially-efficient tax reforms. The statistical properties of ...

This paper uncovers an increasing proportion of quoted UK companies omitting cash dividends. Using a large panel of quoted UK companies, we estimate models for the incidence of dividend omissions and cuts as functions of financial characteristics including cash flow, leverage, investment opportunities, investment and company size. These variables account for most of the increase in omission sin...

Mike Brewer is Director of the Direct Tax and Welfare Research Programme at the IFS and a Research Affiliate of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. His main research interests are in the impact of welfare reform and the personal tax and benefit system on families with children. He has evaluated the labour market impact of the working families’ tax credit, and the impact o...

This paper studies the effect of corporate taxes on investment. Using firm-level data on German corporations, we investigate the 2008 tax reform that cut corporate taxes by 10 percentage points. We expect heterogeneous investment responses across firms, since firms with a foreign parent have more cross-country profit shifting opportunities than domestically owned firms. Using a matching differe...

The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 reduced individual income tax rates for most taxpayers. The conventional wisdom, and evidence from earlier reductions in marginal tax rates, suggests that such reductions are associated with expansions of small businesses. In this paper I investigate how the business decisions of self-employed taxpayers responded to the 2001 rate cut...

This paper analyzes the behavior of stock prices around ex-dividend days after the implementation of the 1986 Tax Reform Act that dramatically reduced the difference between the tax treatment of realized long-term capital gains and dividend income in 1987 and completely eliminated the differential in 1988. We show that this tax change had no effect on the ex-dividend stock price behavior, which...

TAX PROPOSALS: Currently, the combination of worker and employer contributions in a defined contribution plan is capped by the federal tax code at the lesser of $49,000 per year or 100 percent of a worker's compensation (participants over age 50 can make additional "catch-up" contributions). As part of the effort to lower the federal deficit and reduce federal "tax expenditures," two major refo...

The European Commission recently proposed to move towards a consolidated tax base for European multinational companies, to be allocated across EU member states through a system of formula apportionment. This paper argues that while the Commission’s four alternative blueprints for company tax reform may reduce existing problems of transfer pricing, they will also create new distortions as long a...

This paper examines the effects of province corporate income tax policies on firm employment. It uses A-share listed Chinese firms’ panel data for 2004 to 2014. To control for unobservable time-varying province characteristics, we employ a quadratic function of time to approximate the effect of time-varying province heterogeneity. We also construct an instrumental variable to deal with the pote...

A comprehensive tax and benefit incidence analysis is presented covering the redistributive fiscal instruments implemented in Mexico in 2008 and 2010, representative of the urban and rural sectors, as well as nationally. The expansion of basic social programs and effectively targeted direct monetary transfers have increased the progressivity of Mexico ́s fiscal system in recent years, but redist...