In this paper we examine government debt and tax-transfer policies that can improve the allocation of risk between generations. Markets cannot allocate risk efficiently between two generations whenever the two generations are not both alive prior to the occurrence of a stochastic event. This implies that government policies transferring risk between generations have the potential to create firs...

Consider the finance of an exogenous path of public expenditure, G(t), with taxes and public debt issues. In the absence of unexpected default, borrowing does not allow the government to escape taxes in a present-value sense. But the choices of how much to borrow and in what form affect the timing of tax collections and the ways in which these collections are contingent on economic outcomes. Th...

In this paper, we extend the framework of Leland (1994b) who proposed a structural model of roll-over debt structure in a Black-Scholes framework to the case of a double exponential jump diffusion process. We consider a trade-off model with firm’s parameters as firm risk, riskfree interest rate, payout rate as well as tax benefit of coupon payments, default costs, violation of the absolute prio...

We analyze the role of government intertemporal budget policies in a growing open economy including nominal assets in the presence of an upward sloping supply of debt. This introduces transitional dynamics that influence the effects of government policy instruments on the long term fiscal liability. In particular, shifts in capital income taxes can lead to dynamic scoring effects through the ev...

In this paper we examine how model uncertainty due to the preference for robustness (RB) affects optimal taxation and the evolution of debt in the Barro tax-smoothing model (1979). We first study how the government spending shocks are absorbed in the short run by varying taxes or through debt under RB. Furthermore, we show that introducing RB improves the model’s predictions by generating (i) t...

This paper develops and analyzes a model in which tax considerations and financial reporting considerations have countervailing effects on a firm’s investments in internally developed intangible assets. It also proposes and estimates a new measure of tax preferences, which we call the economic effective tax rate. This measure reflects both investments in intangible assets and the use of debt fi...

The tax preference for interest payments by corporations as compared to dividend payments is a long surviving feature of many tax systems. Many have argued that there is no reason for this preference and so it distorts the capital structure of corporations needlessly. This article argues that because the returns to equity are more positively skewed as compared to debt, individual investors will...

Fiscal considerations and commitment drive the choice of monetary policy regime, especially for developing countries. I survey the fiscal foundations of price determination, and study the maximize-inflation-tax, interest rate rule, peg and currency board, and dollarization regime. Since nominal debt acts like equity for the government, the dollarization question is like the question whether a f...

This paper presents and analyzes an endogenous growth model with public capital and progressive taxation. Two versions are considered: The first versions assumes that the budget of the government is balanced at each point of time. The second allows for public debt but asserts that the ratio of the primary surplus to gross domestic income is a positive linear function of the debt income ratio wh...