Nathan Seegert and Eric Ohrn, 2019.In a study that examines the impact of shareholder taxation on the quality of mergers and acquisitions, the authors demonstrate how investor-level taxes can create a tax discount that distorts acquisition behavior and encourages firms to acquire more assets. This in turn decreases the return on acquired assets and the average [...]
Elena Patel, Naomi Feldman, Laura Kawano, Nirupama Rao, Michael Stevens and Jesse Edgerton, 2018. Using data from U.S. corporate tax returns, the authors find robust evidence that public firms invest more than private firms overall, particularly in research and development, and that firms dedicate more of their investment to research and development following an IPO. The [...]
Nathan Seegert, 2018. The author finds that 18 states have increased the riskiness of their tax portfolio since the Great Recession, while only five decreased the riskiness of their tax portfolio. However it was a need for revenue that drove many of these states to accept additional revenue volatility. Roughly half of the states that changed [...]
Elena Patel, Katherine Lim, and Molly Saunders-Scott, 2018. In a presentation prepared for the National Tax Association 2018 Spring Symposium, the authors examine changes to the tax treatment of S-corporation losses in the 2017 tax law and examine characteristics of S-corporations with losses, trends in losses over time, and comparisons to C-corporations. [download pdf]
Elena Patel and Nathan Seegert, 2017. The authors study an investment tax shock on U.S. hospitals and find that hospitals in concentrated markets increased investment by 5.0% ($2.1 million) more in response to tax incentives than firms in competitive markets. Further, firms’ investment responses monotonically increased with market concentration. [download pdf]
Adam Looney, 2017. The author finds that abuse of a tax deduction intended to encourage conservation of environmentally important land and historic buildings has cost the government billions of dollars of revenue while often doing little to advance environmental protection. [download pdf]
Adam Looney and Aaron Krupkion, 2017. To help understand the policy considerations surrounding the taxation of pass-through businesses and the implications of potential reforms, the authors present nine facts about pass-throughs and the current U.S. approach to taxing business. [download pdf]
Adam Looney, Tiffany Chou, and Tara Watson, 2017. To align incentives of higher education institutions with their student loan borrowers and taxpayers, the authors propose an institutional accountability system in which institutions with poor loan performance reimburse the federal loan program for a fraction of unrepaid loan dollars. [download pdf]
Adam Looney, Tiffany Chou , and Tara Watson, 2017. The authors identify a particular metric of institutional loan performance, the cohort repayment rate (i.e. a measure of how much of their loans a particular group of students has repaid several years after graduation), that could be used to create accountability among higher education institutions. Ultimately, it [...]
Adam Looney, Emilie Jackson, and Shanthi Ramnath, 2017. In this paper, the authors draw on administrative tax records to provide a more complete picture of the growing number of American workers who earn income outside of traditional employee-employer relationships through self-employment and business ownership. [download pdf]