The U.S. corporate tax distorts the behavior of both real and financial decisions. With respect to the former, the variation in depreciation allowances and investment tax credit provisions across types of investments leads to widely vazying effective tax rates, especially since 1981. Financial policy is distorted by the differential treatment of debt and equity. The purpose of this paper is to examine, using firm-level panel data, the relationship between real and financial decisions by corporations, in part to determine the extent to which these biases off set or reinforce each other.Our results are tentative and suggest that patterns of real and financial behavior are only partially consistent with predictions of various capital structure models (e.g. bankruptcy/agency cost, limited taxshield)and that there is no obvious offset on the financial side to the tax bias against investment in structures.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
1151.
Length: Date of creation: Jun 1985 Date of revision: Publication status: published relationship to a non-chapter. This should not happen. Please contact NBER. Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:1151
Note: ME Contact details of provider: Postal: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. Phone: 617-868-3900 Email: Web page: http://www.nber.org More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: ().
Related research
Keywords:
Other versions of this item:
Chapter
Alan J. Auerbach, 1985.
"Real Determinants of Corporate Leverage,"
NBER Chapters,
in: Corporate Capital Structures in the United States, pages 301-324
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!]
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.