This paper tests whether the 2003 dividend tax cut—one of the largest reforms ever to a US capital tax rate—stimulated corporate investment and increased labor earnings, using a quasi-experimental design and US corporate tax returns from years 1996–2008. I estimate that the tax cut caused zero change in corporate investment and employee compensation. Economically, the statistical precision chal...

We examine the relationship between economic growth, tax policy, and the distribution of capital and labor ownership in a one-sector political-economy model of endogenous growth with productive government spending Þnanced by a proportional tax on capital income. Our analysis shows that inequality in wealth and income can be positively or negatively related to the optimal tax rate. In either env...

What are the macroeconomic effects of tax adjustments in response to large public debt shocks in highly integrated economies? The answer from standard closed-economy models is deceptive, because they underestimate the elasticity of capital tax revenues and ignore crosscountry spillovers of tax changes. Instead, we examine this issue using a two-country model that matches the observed elasticity...

This paper develops a numerical endogenous growth model approximating an infinite horizon which allows us to investigate the relationship between trade liberalization and economic growth. Although economic theory generally implies that trade liberalization will enhance economic growth, and these phenomena are positively correlated in empirical tests, the connection is not well substantiated in ...

There are strong incentives to delay or accelerate investment to take advantage of predictable changes in after-tax prices. For sufficiently long-lived capital goods, these incentives are so strong that the intertemporal elasticity of investment demand is nearly infinite. For temporary tax changes, the equilibrium shadow price of long-lived capital goods should fully reflect the tax subsidy reg...

We consider tax competition in a world with tax bases exhibiting different degrees of mobility, modeled as mobile and immobile capital. An agreement among countries not to give preferential treatment to mobile capital results in an equilibrium where mobile capital is nevertheless taxed relatively lightly. In particular, one or two of the smallest countries, measured by their stocks of immobile ...

How do dividend taxes affect firm behavior and what are their distributional and efficiency effects? To answer these questions, the first problem is coming up with an explanation for why firms pay dividends, in spite of their tax penalty. This paper surveys three different models for why firms pay dividends, and then uses each model to examine the behavioral and efficiency effects of dividend t...

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...