The American Jobs Creation Act (AJCA) significantly lowered the tax cost at which US firms could access their unrepatriated foreign earnings. We use this temporary shock to the cost of financing investment and its variation across firms, to examine the role of financial constraints in the firm’s investment decisions. Controlling for the ability to repatriate foreign earnings in a more tax efficient way under the AJCA, we find that for a majority of firms there was little change in domestic investment – the policy objective of the law. We do find, however, that for a subset of firms which are financially constrained, that a majority of the repatriated funds were invested in approved domestic investment. We find little change in financial policy (e.g. leverage and equity payouts) once we control for the ability to repatriate funds under the AJCA. These findings point out the importance of understanding finance theory when designing optimally targeted tax incentives.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
15248.
Length: Date of creation: Aug 2009 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:15248
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Find related papers by JEL classification: G31 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Capital Budgeting; Investment Policy G32 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Financing Policy; Capital and Ownership Structure G38 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Government Policy and Regulation K34 - Law and Economics - - Other Substantive Areas of Law - - - Tax Law
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Heitor Almeida & Murillo Campello & Michael S. Weisbach, 2004.
"The Cash Flow Sensitivity of Cash,"
Journal of Finance,
American Finance Association, vol. 59(4), pages 1777-1804, 08.
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