We examine the optimal taxation of capital in a general-equilibrium heterogeneousagent economy with uninsurable idiosyncratic investment or capital-income risk. Our framework combines elements from the Ramsey and the Mirrlees traditions, as we consider a linear tax but also introduce lump-sum transfers. The tractability of our model allows for an analytic characterization of the long run, as we...

In his “Principles of Political Economy and Taxation” [9], Ricardo cautioned that the deficit-financing of public expenditures sets back the growth of capital. The reference was to economies with rapid adjustment to “full-employment” equilibrium. While the Keynesians denied the rapid-equilibration assumption, the postwar reevaluation of monetary policy led to a modern restatement of Ricardo’s d...

Existing literature focuses on how corporate taxation affects firms’ investment decisions by altering after-tax returns. This paper instead examines how corporate taxation affects investment by reducing the cash flow a firm has available to invest in the current period. I use a sharp nonlinearity in the mapping from pre-tax profitability to taxes created by the tax loss carryforward feature of ...

The PaPer examines the shifts in attitudes to foreign investment; charts the dimensions and composition of capital flows to develeping countries; outlines existing barriers and the effects of taxation on these flows, and critically examines the demand for their regulation in the light of the Asian crisis. JEL classification: F3, F21, F23 Address: Dept. of Economics, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Lo...

We study the role of anonymous markets in which trades cannot be monitored by the government. We adopt a Mirrlees approach to analyze economies in which agents have private information and a benevolent government controls optimal redistributive tax policy. While unrestricted access to anonymous markets reduces the set of policy instruments available to the government, it also limits the scope o...

The relationship between venture capital and growth is examined using an endogenous growth model incorporating dynamic contracts between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. At each stage of financing, venture capitalists evaluate the viability of startups. If viable, VCs provide funding for the next stage. The success of a project depends on the amount of funding. The model is confronted wit...

This paper explores the welfare consequences of foreign investment taxation in a small open economy, based on the notion that the true productivity of imported capital may be unknown to policy-makers. It is shown that while asymmetric information between capital importers and the host government precludes the use of a productivity specific policy measure, an across-the-board policy suffers from...

Previous work on the effect of taxes on foreign direct investment (FDI) focused primarily on capital income taxes. We investigate the proposition that other forms of taxation may also deter FDI. We use tax ratios, i.e., average effective tax rates, on consumption, labor and capital income for a panel of 25 OECD countries from 1975-2006. We find that increases in relative tax rates on capital in...

The return on a bond investment comes from three sources: Interest payments, realized capital gains and accrued capital gains. We provide an exact description on how the capital gains can be measured under a variety of accounting rules for measuring accruals and study the theoretical properties of such rules, their taxation consequences and the relation between the yield before tax and the yiel...