transfer pricing double taxation and the cost of capital the effects of double taxation are analysed when a multinational enterprise can shift profits by transfer pricing behaviour it is shown that the well known hartman sinn neutrality result may not hold in this case surprisingly an increase in the taxation of foreign dividends may lead to a lower cost of capital for the foreign subsidiary i introduction in recent years there has been growing awareness that multinational firms can evade a large portion of their statutory tax burden by manipulating transfer prices in cross border transactions one reason for shifting profits between jurisdictions using transfer pricing is the differences in corporate tax rates by underpricing intra company sales and overpricing intracompany purchases a subsidiary located in a high tax country can increase the multinational s overall profit since the parent s gain in after tax profit is higher than the subsidiary s net of tax loss a second reason for setting

dynamic jump intensities and risk premiums evidence from s p500 returns and options we build a new class of discrete time models that are relatively easy to estimate using returns and or options the distribution of returns is driven by two factors dynamic volatility and dynamic jump intensity each factor has its own risk premium the models significantly outperform standard models without jumps when estimated on s p500 returns we find very strong support for time varying jump intensities compared to the risk premium on dynamic volatility the risk premium on the dynamic jump intensity has a much larger impact on option prices we confirm these findings using joint estimation on returns and large option samples

dividend taxes corporate investment and q abstract taxes on corporate distributions have traditionally been regarded as a double tax on corporate income this view implies that while the total effective tax rate on corporate source income affects real economic decisions the distribution of this tax burden between the shareholders and the corporation is irrelevant recent research has suggested an alternative to this traditional view one explanation of why firms in the united states pay dividends in spite of the heavy tax liabilities associated with this form of distribution is that the stock market capitalizes the tax payments associated with corporate distributions this capitalization leaves investors indifferent at the margin between a corporation s decision to pay out dividends or to retain earnings this alternative view holds that while changes in the dividend tax rate will affect shareholder wealth they will have no impact on corporate investment decisions this paper develops econometric tests which distinguish between these two views of dividend taxation by extending tobin s q theory of investment to incorporate taxes at both the corporate and personal levels the implications of each view for corporate investment decisions can be derived the competing views may be tested by comparing the performance of investment equations estimated under each theory s predictions british time series data are particularly appropriate for testing hypotheses about dividend taxes because of the substantial postwar variation in effective tax rates on corporate distributions the econometric results suggest that dividend taxes have important effects on investment decisions

capital allocation how the us compares with other major industrialized nations data for the seven major industrialized nations spanning two decades provide evidence that capital formation as a percentage of gross domestic product differs significantly among the major industrialized nations comparatively the us ranks among the leaders in residential structures and among the lowest in commercial structures however us private sector allocation of capital to machinery and equipment appears to be in line with other major trading nations the rate of capital cost recovery appears to affect the amount of capital allocated to commercial structures but not to residential structures or machinery and equipment likewise changes in the capital cost recovery provisions under the economic recovery tax act of 1981 seem to have led to an increase in capital allocated to commercial structures and to a marginal increase in capital allocated to machinery and equipment

the importance of reporting conventions for the theory of corporate taxation abstract this paper shows that for the analysis of a tax policy it is important to be explicit about the reporting convention to which a corporation tax is required or allowed to adhere the paper shows that the corporation tax cannot be used to alter capital formation under uniform reporting a convention required by the majority of the oecd countries this tax is however a more useful policy tool in those oecd countries that have created the privilege of separate reporting fiscal depreciation makes the marginal valuation of equity differ from the marginal valuation of capital use of tax allowances directed to investment stimulus operates rather differently under the two reporting conventions

tax policy uncertainty and corporate investment abstract the anticipatory effects of a corporate tax reform of the tax cut cum base broadening variety are analyzed in a dynamic stochastic adjustment model of firm behavior focusing on the case where the firm is uncertain both about the timing and the contents of the expected reform the value of the firm is solved prior to and after the reform the existence of investment spurts prior to the implementation of the tax reform is established rigorous results are derived under constant returns and the effects of diminishing returns are explained the expectation of a future tax cut causes the firm to accelerate optimal investment while the expectation of a reduction in the tax base the rate of fiscal depreciation has the opposite effect for a firm which updates information timing uncertainty interacts with the expectation effect moreover increased timing uncertainty may accelerate or decelerate investment as an optimal response to an expected tax cut futhermore for reasonable assumptions it is shown that a rate cut cum base broadening tax reform of the type implemented in several oecd countries in the 1980s and 1990s cannot be revenue neutral

the incidence and allocation effects of a tax on corporate distributions abstract to study the effects of double taxation first at the corporation level then at the shareholder level this paper analyzes a model with a tax on all corporate distributions to equity owners and no other taxes contrary to the common view the tax is shown to have no subtitution effect and in particular no effect on the corporate choice between debt and equity via retained earnings finance the analysis opens to question certain arguments commonly used to support integration of corporation and individual income taxes via dividend relief

the skew risk premium in the equity index market we develop a new method for measuring moment risk premiums we find that the skew premium accounts for over 40 of the slope in the implied volatility curve in the s p 500 market skew risk is tightly related to variance risk in the sense that strategies designed to capture the one and hedge out exposure to the other earn an insignificant risk premium this provides a new testable restriction for asset pricing models trying to capture in particular disaster risk premiums we base our results on a general trading strategy by replicating contracts that swap implied for realized conditional asset moments

business political power the case of taxation we examine contending views about the forms and mechanisms of business power in u s politics by estimating time series models explaining taxation and redistribution taxation and redistribution constitute strong cases for theories about business and class power since all firms have an interest in reducing taxation we find that changes in corporate taxation and in redistribution between capital gains income and earned income and between corporate taxation and individual taxation are strongly influenced by political partisanship with democratic administrations increasing the tax burden on firms and their owners how far corporations engage in electoral financing measured through the establishment of corporate political action committees is also influential the models show some evidence consistent with the understanding of class power conceptualized by bowles gordon and weisskopf and the presence of election cycle effects but inconsistent with implications arising from the structural dependence of the state on capital and asset concentration in the largest corporations as a mechanism of class power

tax asymmetries the cost of capital and investment some evidence from united kingdom panel data a measure of the cost of capital is developed that incorporates the dynamic effects of tax changes and tax asymmetries estimates of the cost of capital are made using an unbalanced panel of 1987 u k quoted companies over the period 1971 to 1984 there is wide cross sectional variation in the cost of capital the measure is used in estimating an equation where this cross sectional variation is found to be a significant determinant of the level of company investment copyright 1989 by royal economic society

regional policy incentives and the relative costs of capital in assisted areas in britain and germany bennett r j and krebs g 1989 regional policy incentives and the relative costs of capital in assisted areas in britain and germany reg studies 23 201 218 regional policies of various forms have been employed in most european countries both as means of stimulating investment in problem regions and as an attempt to limit the pace of industrial contraction this paper evaluates the resulting incentives to capital in britain and germany and compares the stimulus provided by the different packages of incentives over time and between the two countries it is demonstrated that pre tax real rates of return and fiscal wedges between pre and post tax real rates of return are affected very markedly by the incentive packages in britain fiscal wedges of 3 derive from regional policy up to the late 1970s but decline to 1 6 in the mid 1980s in germany fiscal wedges increase from 3 to 3 5 over the same period on a standardized basis of comparison thus declines in the significance of regional po

the incidence and efficiency costs of corporate taxation when corporate and noncorporate firms produce the same good one difficulty confronting harberger s celebrated model of the corporate income tax is how to treat noncorporate production in primarily corporate sectors and corporate production in primarily noncorporate sectors the paper presents a two good model with corporate and noncorporate production of both goods the incidence of corporate tax in our mutual production model can differ markedly from that in the harberger model the difference between the two models in deadweight loss is also striking with losses in the mutual production model many times larger than those in the harberger model

parametric inference and dynamic state recovery from option panels we develop a new parametric estimation procedure for option panels observed with error we exploit asymptotic approximations assuming an ever increasing set of option prices in the moneyness cross sectional dimension but with a fixed time span we develop consistent estimators for the parameters and the dynamic realization of the state vector governing the option price dynamics the estimators converge stably to a mixed gaussian law and we develop feasible estimators for the limiting variance we also provide semiparametric tests for the option price dynamics based on the distance between the spot volatility extracted from the options and one constructed nonparametrically from high frequency data on the underlying asset furthermore we develop new tests for the day by day model fit over specific regions of the volatility surface and for the stability of the risk neutral dynamics over time a comprehensive monte carlo study indicates that the inference procedures work well in empirically realistic settings in an empirical application to s p 500 index options guided by the new diagnostic tests we extend existing asset pricing models by allowing for a flexible dynamic relation between volatility and priced jump tail risk importantly we document that the priced jump tail risk typically responds in a more pronounced and persistent manner than volatility to large negative market shocks

how effective are fiscal incentives for r d a review of the evidence this paper surveys the econometric evidence on the effectiveness of fiscal incentives for r d we describe the effects of tax systems in oecd countries on the user cost of r d the current position changes over time and across different firms in different countries we describe and criticize the methodologies used to evaluate the effect of the tax system on

credit and deferral as international investment incentives abstract many governments tax the foreign income of their firms using a system that grants credits for foreign taxes paid and permits tax deferral for unrepatriated income this paper shows that such tax systems encourage firms to restrict their equity stakes in new foreign investments and to finance their new investments with considerable debt these incentives exist even when transfer price regulation effectively limits the profit rates foreign subsidiaries can earn the behavior of the foreign subsidiaries of us multinationals in 1984 appears to be consistent with these incentives

the vanishing harberger triangle this paper shows that the double taxation of corporate dividends or profit repatriations implies a nucleus theory of the corporation after the firm is set up with a small stock of original capital it enters a phase of purely internal growth during which no dividends are paid and no shares are issued the phase terminates when an efficient stock of capital has been accumulated and dividends are paid during the growth phases the tax distortion is inversely related to the tax burden and it is larger than conventional formulae for the cost of internal and external equity finance suggest

a two tiered earnings frontier estimation of employer and employee information in the labor market this pap er develops a two tiered frontier estimation procedure to decompose the residual of an earnings function into three components the first component can be interpreted as being purely random search theory is used to show that the other two components represent employee and employer ignorance of offer and reservation wages respectively relative employee and employer ignorance estimates are presented for various population strata copyright 1987 by mit press

a new approach to measuring financial contagion this article proposes a new approach to evaluate contagion in financial markets our measure of contagion captures the coincidence of extreme return shocks across countries within a region and across regions we characterize the extent of contagion its economic significance and its determinants using a multinomial logistic regression model applying our approach to daily returns of emerging markets during the 1990s we find that contagion is predictable and depends on regional interest rates exchange rate changes and conditional stock return volatility evidence that contagion is stronger for extreme negative returns than for extreme positive returns is mixed

gradual reforms of capital income taxation this paper analyzes the intertemporal allocation effects of anticipated tax rate changes reconsidering the recommendations of the meade committee in a perfect foresight general equilibrium model of economic growth it is shown that the r base or consumption tax can be more distortionary than an income tax and that a revenue neutral integration of corporate and personal taxation will lower social welfare moreover it is argued that a dividend tax dominates the r base tax because it places its distortions on the financial rather than on the real side of the economy copyright 1989 by american economic association

the estimation of a joint wage hours labor supply model in this paper the standard cross sectional static model of labor supply is modified to make the wage endogenous and a joint wage hours model is estimated the econometric technique addresses the non linearity of the budget constraint by approximating the constraint by a series of discrete points the results show that the budget constraint is indeed nonlinear that hours affect the wage quadratically that true wage elasticities are lower as a result and that the model fits the hours distribution much better than the standard tobit model

on the taxation of multinational corporate investment when the deferral method is used by the capital exporting country abstract the user cost of capital for a subsidiary is derived when the capital exporter uses the deferral method for the taxation of the parent s foreign source income the hartman sinn result implying that the capital exporter s tax on remitted dividends is irrelevant to a subsidiary using retentions to finance investment is shown to be correct only when host and home countries have similar corporate income tax bases otherwise both the home and host country corporate tax provisions influence the cost of capital it is also shown that a cash flow tax by the capital importer is not neutral owing to interactions with the capital exporter s tax regime

share repurchases the new view and the cost of capital this paper counters the view that the possibility of share repurchases invalidates the predictions of the new or trapped equity view of corporate taxation it is shown that the new view s basic cost of capital expression which distinguishes it from the old view remains valid regardless of the proportions in which corporate distributions of earnings split into share repurchases and ordinary dividend payments it is widely held that the new view of corporate taxation put forward by auerbach 1979 1983 l3radford 1981 king 1977 fullerton and king 1984 and others is incompatible with the phenomenon of share repurchases share repurchases it is maintained undermine this view s basic premise that the corporate firm is an equity trap and thus invalidate its predictions of the firm s investment behavior in my letter i argue that this verdict may be premature while i certainly do not want to claim to have isolated the forces that determine the firm s choice between dividend payments and share repurchases i hesitate to accept the argument that the invalidity of one of a theory s assumptions will necessarily render its predictions incorrect to be precise i will show that the new view s basic cost of capital expression that distinguishes it from the old view stays valid regardless of the proportions in which corporate distributions of earnings split into share repurchases and ordinary dividend payments consider a stylized class of capital income tax systems that resembles the class operative in the 0ecd countries let 7r be the rate of corporate tax on retained earnings rd the rate of corporate tax on dividends which equals rr in the us rc the effective rate of tax on accrued capital gains rdp the rate of personal tax on dividend income and 7 the rate of personal tax on interest income where

measuring marginal income tax rates for individuals in canada averages and distributions over time average marginal tax rates amtrs and the dispersion of marginal tax rates across income groups for canada over 1947 91 are reported federal amtrs fluctuated with little trend from 1947 to the mid 1960s rose to the mid 1970s fell and then rose from the early 1980s through to 1991 federal plus provincial amtrs trended upward after 1949 increasing fastest from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s relative dispersion of mtrs shows a strong downward trend over the sample period this compression has been due partly to a decline in top mtrs but the main influence has been the steady increase in the portion of the population and of income subject to tax the amtr time series is quite volatile difference stationarity is not rejected

growth effect of taxes in an endogenous growth model to what extent do taxes affect economic growth abstract this paper presents an endogenous growth model comprising of financial human and physical capital and incorporating major features of a general tax system technology and preference parameter values in the model are chosen to fit the actual growth experiences of the united states and a rapidly growing east asian nic using the calibrated model i assess the role of differences in taxes and other variables in explaining the difference in growth rates the main findings are i the difference in tax systems across countries explains a significant proportion around 30 of the difference in growth rates ii the difference in preferences explains at most 4 and iii differences in labor income tax debt equity ratio and inflation can be important in explaining the growth difference further i evaluate the contribution of the monetary factor to the growth rate gap and the growth effect of us tax reforms e g revenue neutral changes in relative tax structure

the risk premia embedded in index options we study the dynamic relation between aggregate stock market risks and risk premia via an exploration of the time series of equity index option surfaces the analysis is based on estimating a general parametric asset pricing model for the risk neutral equity market dynamics using a panel of options on the s p 500 index while remaining fully nonparametric about the actual evolution of market risks we nd that the risk neutral jump intensity which controls the pricing of left tail risk cannot be spanned by the market volatility and its components so an additional factor is required to account for its dynamics this tail factor has no incremental predictive power for future equity return volatility or jumps beyond what is captured by the current and past level of volatility in contrast the novel factor is critical in predicting the future market excess returns over horizons up to one year and it explains a large fraction of the future variance risk premium we contrast our ndings with those implied by structural asset pricing models that seek to rationalize the predictive power of option data relative to those studies our ndings suggest a wider wedge between the dynamics of equity market risks and the corresponding risk premia with the latter typically displaying a far more persistent reaction following market crises

evaluating the minimum asset tax on corporations an option pricing approach abstract king fullerton methodology cannot assess the minimum asset tax because it cannot handle uncertainty we present an alternative based on option pricing and show how carryover rules depreciation conventions and uncertainty affect the mat burden using brazilian data we show a because of the high intersectoral variance of returns on capital the mat does not reduce sectoral distortions b while high variance raises the mat burden high risk firms are not hit harder by the mat high risk firms also have a high rate of return which reduces the impact of the mat

welfare and optimum dynamic taxation of consumption and income abstract this paper estimates that the us could attain large welfare gains by implementing an optimal ramsey tax policy that taxes consumption and income it is also found that the welfare implications associated with taxing consumption are quantitatively more important than those associated with dynamically taxing income indeed replacing income taxes with a constant consumption tax leads to a welfare gain that is only slightly lower than that attained by a dynamic policy that taxes consumption and income in computing these welfare gains careful attention is given to the dynamic path of tax rates and the transitional dynamics associated with how the economy responds to a new tax policy

selectivity and distributional assumptions in static labor supply models the technique of estimating labor supply models has drastically changed since the early 1970s while early studies 28 23 estimated a single labor supply equation the occurrence of nonworkers soon became an issue of concern that complicated both the model estimated and the estimation technique people choose to work or not to work based on their opportunity set workers are therefore special they have poorer than average alternatives or better than average wage offers 15 the sample of workers is not random anymore but rather self selected ols estimators are biased and inconsistent and new estimation techniques are needed to correct that deficiency this realization led to an expansion of the labor supply model with a wage equation as wage offers of non workers are generally unobservable 9 while at the same time an array of new econometric techniques came forth to deal with problems of self selection and dichotomous endogenous variables two step and maximum likelihood are standard estimation methods nowadays stimulated by work of heckman and others 18 19 in turn these improved techniques allowed for more sophisticated labor supply models involving tax and transfer schedules 8 cost of labor force entry and institutional constraints 12 16 29 and wage rates interactively determined by labor hours 30 all of these new studies have one assumption in common the random disturbances are assumed to be generated by the normal distribution in an appeal to the familiar central limit theorem this theorem states roughly that the combined influence of numerous independent neglected factors may be represented by a single disturbance term that is approximately normally distributed

the taxation of corporate investment income in canada an analysis of marginal effective tax rates this paper reports estimates of marginal effective tax rates on corporate investment income in canada taking into account sales taxes as well as corporation personal and business property taxes marginal effective tax rates are found to vary widely depending upon the type of asset acquired the industry in which the asset is used the manner in which the investment is financed and the tax status of the investor supplying the funds an examination of the sensitivity of these estimates to various tax arbitrage assumptions reveals the pattern of marginal effective tax rates to be similar irrespective of the arbitrage assumption used l imposition des revenus dinvestissement des societes au canada une analyse des taux marginaux effectifs ce memoire evalue les taux marginaux effectifs d imposition des revenus d investissement des societes au canada en tenant compte des taxes de vente aussi bien que des impots personnels et des impots sur les profits et sur les actifs des societes i1 appert que les taux marginaux effectifs d imposition varient grandement selon le type d actif acquis l industrie dans laquelle cet actif est utilise la faqon dont cet

exploring return dynamics via corridor implied volatility some fundamental questions regarding equity index return dynamics are difficult to address due to the latent character of spot volatility we exploit tick by tick option quotes to compute a novel corridor volatility index which may serve as an observable proxy for short term volatility exploiting this index we find that equity index volatility jumps are common symmetrically distributed and cojump with the underlying returns moreover the return volatility asymmetry is more pronounced than is generally recognized and is in force for both diffusive and jump innovations in volatility finally the index performs admirably during turbulent market conditions constituting a useful real time gauge of market stress

short run politicians and long run tax revenue an empirical assessment a life cycle growth model fit to the u s economy is used to calculate the tax rate that would maximize steady state tax revenue the rate that would be set by a short run politician interested in maximizing current period receipts is also calculated in the current period the capital stock is fixed but labor is a variable factor following the intuition of buchanan and lee 1982 it might be suspected that this fixity of capital would lead the short run politician to set taxes above the steady state revenue maximizing level however such a conclusion does not hold for the cases considered in this study

uk stock relief legislation and the short run tax elasticity of inventory investment abstract this paper analyzes the effects of uk stock relief legislation on the cost of capital for inventory investment taking account of the tax position of individual companies a sample of large uk companies representative of the uk non oil non financial corporate sector is used to make calculations of the cost of capital both for aggregate corporate inventory investment and for various industrial sectors stock relief legislation reduces the cost of capital by between 4 and 8 per annum the tax position of individual companies generally makes only a small difference to the aggregate cost of capital stock relief legislation induces a pronounced seasonality in the cost of capital due to the uneven distribution of the end date of company accounting years this seasonality is exploited in time series estimates of the short run elasticity on the pre tax and post tax cost of capital for six manufacturing subsectors there is some evidence of a significant effect from the pre tax cost of capital on inventory investment but no evidence of any response to the tax incentives created by the stock relief legislation

the social opportunity cost of capital in the presence of labour market distortions this paper examines the conditions under which the social opportunity cost of capital in a tax distorted economy is equal to the gross of tax return to capital plus the excess of the market over the shadow wage bill whenever public investment serves as an unpriced or underpriced input in the private sector s production process only part of the excess of the market over the shadow wage bill should be attributed to private sector capital in addition whenever some of the benefits of public investment are appropriated by owners of capital the gross of tax return to capital will tend to overstate the genuine marginal product of capital the overall implication is that the social discount rate may be less than the gross of tax rate of return to capital in the private sector even if public investment crowds out private investment dollar for dollar

tail risk concerns everywhere we show that the beta with respect to an index of global ex ante tail risk concerns x1d53e x1d540 x1d54f which we construct using out of the money options on multiple global assets negatively drives cross sectional return variations across asset classes including international equity indices foreign currencies and government bond futures the pricing power of x1d53e x1d540 x1d54f becomes stronger when more asset class level tail risk concerns are incorporated in the index construction x1d53e x1d540 x1d54f also dominates asset class level tail risk concerns in pricing assets within each asset class these evidences imply that the pricing effect of tail risk concerns works predominantly as a global channel the x1d53e x1d540 x1d54f pricing effect is distinct from that of tail risk factors based on historical realizations consistent with the interpretation that tail risk concerns likely reflect investors ex ante subjective belief about tail risk this paper was accepted by neng wang finance

the sensitivity of an empirical model of married women s hours of work to economic and statistical assumptions this study undertakes a systematic analysis of several theoretic and statistical assumption s used in many empirical models of female labor supply using a singl e data set psid 1975 labor supply data the author is able to replic ate most of the range of estimated income and substitution effects fo und in previous studies in this field he undertakes extensive specif ication tests and finds that most of this range should be rejected du e to statistical and model misspecifications the two most important assumptions appear to be the tobit assumption used to control for sel f selection into the labor force and exogeneity assumptions on the wi fe s wage rate and her labor market experience copyright 1987 by the econometric society

marginal taxes and the asset portfolios of swedish households this paper focuses on the effects of marginal tax rates wealth income and a set of socioeconomic and demographic variables on the portfolio composition of households using detailed micro data on 2 000 swedish households in particular efforts are made to disentangle the effects of marginal tax rates on the portfolio behavior of households some econometric problems involved when estimating asset demand equations in the presence of incomplete portfolios are briefly discussed a final section examines the overall effect of marginal tax rates on asset demands by applying estimated discrete and continuous portfolio equations to compute different tax elasticities

the effectiveness of tax incentives for r d i in developing countries the case of argentina abstract there is increasing interest in developing countries in granting tax incentives in order to encourage private investment in research development and innovation r d i however evidence on the effectiveness of such schemes in achieving policy goals in weak innovation systems contexts is still very scarce this paper aims at narrowing this knowledge gap by focusing on the effects of a tax credit scheme for promoting firm level innovation investment in argentina the analysis applies dynamic panel data techniques to a novel dataset merging several waves of the national innovation survey collected by the national institute of statistics and censuses the results suggest that the elasticity of r d i investment to its user cost of capital is a greater than 1 in absolute terms which implies that the intervention has been effective in increasing firms innovation efforts however effects vary depending on the type of innovation investment being subsidized industrial sector and size of the firm moreover when innovation investment is divided into innovation related capital goods expenditures and only r d the results suggest that the absolute value of the elasticity for the r d component of the innovation investment is less than 1 these heterogeneous effects should be exploited for further policy design

the ineffectiveness of effective tax rates on business investment a critique of feldstein s fisher schultz lecture abstract in his fisher schultz lecture martin feldstein 1982 examined the effects of non neutral tax rules on business investment by estimating three econometric models and he concluded that the rising rate of inflation has because of the structure of existing u s tax rules substantially discouraged investment in the past 15 years in a detailed examination of feldstein s effective tax rate model and a less extensive review of his other formulations neoclassical and return over cost we advance a number of important and independent criticisms and find that these three models fail to support feldstein s conclusion that taxes have exerted a significantly depressing effect on net investment during the recent inflation episode

a jump diffusion model for option pricing brownian motion and normal distribution have been widely used in the black scholes option pricing framework to model the return of assets however two puzzles emerge from many empirical investigations the leptokurtic feature that the return distribution of assets may have a higher peak and two asymmetric heavier tails than those of the normal distribution and an empirical phenomenon called volatility smile in option markets to incorporate both of them and to strike a balance between reality and tractability this paper proposes for the purpose of option pricing a double exponential jump diffusion model in particular the model is simple enough to produce analytical solutions for a variety of option pricing problems including call and put options interest rate derivatives and path dependent options equilibrium analysis and a psychological interpretation of the model are also presented

tails fears and risk premia we show that the compensation for rare events accounts for a large fraction of the average equity and variance risk premia exploiting the special structure of the jump tails and the pricing thereof we identify and estimate a new investor fears index the index reveals large time varying compensation for fears of disasters our empirical investigations involve new extreme value theory approximations and high frequency intraday data for estimating the expected jump tails under the statistical probability measure and short maturity out of the money options and new model free implied variation measures for estimating the corresponding risk neutral expectations

internationally mobile firms and tax policy abstract this paper analyses how the government should tax internationally mobile firms the analysis finds that if tax authorities are unable to observe firms true mobility and domestic and foreign profitability are uncorrelated then 1 information rents are acquired by immobile inefficient firms and 2 the optimal policy will stimulate investment in the immobile sector compared to the complete information case another result of the paper is that the optimal allocation is implementable within the framework of a corporate income tax system where mobile firms self select more unfavourable capital allowances than immobile firms

foreign profits and domestic investment abstract the paper considers investment incentives in corporate tax systems which grant an imputation credit to shareholders when dividends are distributed from domestic sources an increase in the dividend tax rate which is induced by lowering the shareholders imputation rate is shown to potentially depress domestic investment this result is common to old view models which assume that new equity is the marginal source of firms finance in this paper however the result is derived in a tax capitalization framework where retentions are the marginal source of finance and dividend tax rates are usually regarded as neutral

intangible investment and ramsey capital taxation the standard analysis of optimal fiscal policy aggregates different types of assets into a unique capital good and all types of capital taxes into a unique capital tax this paper considers a disaggregated framework an economy with corporate and dividend taxes where firms invest in both tangible and intangible assets which can be expensed or sweat in our setup firms can always respond to changes in the timing of taxation we find that the optimal long run policy features zero corporate taxes and positive dividend taxes with labor and dividend taxes being identical moreover the initial capital levy is relatively small

new findings on firm investment and monetary transmission in the euro area in this paper we present comparable results on the determinants of firms investment and their link to monetary policy the results have been obtained by the eurosystem monetary transmission network this network has produced a series of papers in which the use of micro data permits estimating and quantifying the relevance of two channels of monetary policy transmission the interest rate and the broad credit channel the research findings provide evidence of an operative interest rate channel in all countries examined moreover the results indicate that variables which proxy firms financial conditions play a role firms characterised by weaker balance sheets show higher liquidity sensitivity

the pricing of tail risk and the equity premium evidence from international option markets we explore the pricing of tail risk as manifest in index options across international equity markets the risk premium associated with negative tail events displays persistent shifts unrelated to

heteroskedastic sample selection and developing country wage equations many researchers have dealt with potential selectivity bias in developing country wage equations by employing heckman s 1979 two step method or related techniques despite the potential for such methods to produce misleading results if the assumptions on which they are based are incorrect this paper argues that the results produced even by parametric easy to implement selectivity bias correction methods can inspire more confidence than the typical applications to date when model selection testing is used to select from a specified diverse set assumptions for which there is support in the data and when sensitivity analysis is used to identify parameters whose estimates are robust across a wide range of assumptions in particular it highlights the importance of allowing for the nonlinearities implied by selection rule heteroskedasticity there is economic reason to suspect heteroskedasticity and econometric reason to believe that the nonlinearities it introduces into the first stage will improve

taxation corporate financial policy and the cost of capital the cost of capital plays an important role in the allocation of resources among competing uses in a decentralized market system the purpose of this paper is to organize and present what is known and what is hypothesized about the effects of taxation on the incentive to invest via the cost of capital taking full account of important issues that arise independently from the question of taxation included in the analysis is a discussion of empirical findings about the interaction of inflation and taxation in influencing the incentive to invest and a treatment of taxation and uncertainty this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

taxation and inflation a new explanation for capital flows abstract in a world of mobile capital the current system of taxation implies that the after tax cost of capital and return to saving in each country are negatively correlated with the rate of inflation thus a country s net foreign asset position ought to be negatively correlated with its long run inflation rate the magnitude of these effects is shown to be potentially large for oecd countries cross section and time series regressions confirm that inflation rates are good predictors of net foreign assets the existing distribution of net foreign assets may therefore largely reflect tax distortions

structural dependence of the state on capital a central claim of both marxist and neoclassical political theory is that under capitalism all governments must respect and protect the essential claims of those who own the productive wealth of society this is the theory of structural dependence of the state on capital using a formal model the internal logic and the robustness of the theory is examined we conclude that in a static sense the theory is false virtually any distribution of consumption between wage earners and owners of capital is compatible with continual private investment once an appropriate set of taxes and transfers is in place yet the state may be structurally dependent in a dynamic sense policies that once in place redistribute income without reducing investment do reduce investment during the period in which they are anticipated but not yet implemented

repatriation taxes and outbound m as repatriation taxes reduce the competitiveness of multinational firms from tax credit countries when bidding for targets in low tax countries this comparative disadvantage with respect to bidders from exemption countries violates ownership neutrality which results in production inefficiencies due to second best ownership structures this paper empirically estimates the magnitude of these effects the abolishment of repatriation taxes in japan and in the u k in 2009 has increased the number of acquisitions abroad by japanese and british firms by 16 1 and 1 6 respectively a similar policy switch in the u s is simulated to increase the number of u s cross border acquisition by 11 0 the yearly gain in efficiency is estimated to be 108 9 million dollar due to the japanese reform and 3 9 million dollar due to the u k reform simulating such a reform for the u s results in a yearly efficiency gain of 537 0 million dollar

local business taxes theory and practice local taxes which are borne by business are an aspect of local government revenue systems in almost all western countries these taxes cover a wide range of possible structures from the highly visible and direct such as taxes on business profits assets and wealth to the more indirect which bear on the inputs to a firm such as payroll property and resource rentals and severance taxes or taxes which bear on outputs such as sales taxes most local governments also employ in addition to taxes user fees and charges the range of local business tax is still further widened when we extend consideration beyond corporate business to include sole traders and partnerships in this case in addition to most of the above taxes we must also consider local taxes on personal income capital gains capital transfers and inheritance hence the range of taxes to be considered amongst local business taxes is both large and very complex