Minimizing capital injections by investment and reinsurance for a piecewise deterministic reserve process model

We consider the possibility for an insurance company to rely on capital injections to bring the reserve back to a given level if it has fallen below it and study the problem of dynamically choosing the reinsurance level and the investment in the financial market in order to minimize the expected discounted total amount of capital injection. The reserve process is described by a piecewise deterministic process, where the random discontinuities are triggered by the arrival of a claim or by a change in the prices of the risky assets in which the company invests. The capital injections, combined with the specific model, make the problem non-linear and difficult to solve via an HJB approach. The emphasis here is on making the actual computation of a solution possible by value iteration combined with an approximation based on discretization. This leads to a nearly optimal solution with an approximation that can be made arbitrarily precise. Numerical results show the feasibility of the proposed approach.     

Tax treatment of dividends and capital gains and the dividend decision under dual income tax

The paper analyses efficiency aspects of a dual income tax system with a higher tax on capital gains than dividends. It argues that apart from the distortions to investments claimed in earlier literature, the system puts even more emphasis in creating incentives for entrepreneurs to participate in tax planning. The paper suggests that the owner of a closely held company can avoid all personal taxes on entrepreneurial income by two tax-planning strategies. The first is the avoidance of distributions, which would be taxed at the tax rate on labour income. These funds would instead be invested in the financial markets. The second strategy is a distribute and call-back policy, converting retained profits into new equity capital. Interestingly, the outcome is that investment in real capital is not distorted in the long-run equilibrium. Empirical evidence using microdata is also provided.      

The incentive to locate a multinational firm: The effect of tax reforms in the United Kingdom

The advent of the single European market has focused attention on the structure of international tax incentives for the location of multinational business. Multinationals that channel foreign income through the United Kingdom have been likely to suffer double taxation in the form of surplus advance corporation tax when they subsequently distribute the income to a foreign parent. This paper shows that the 1993 U.K. tax reforms create a significant reduction in the tax cost of locating in the United Kingdom, relative to traditionally favorable tax regimes such as the Netherlands.     

Mobile people, mobile capital and tax neutrality: Sustaining a market for Offshore Finance Centres

This paper examines the self-reported effects on business performance, sustainability and confidence following international initiatives to regulate Offshore Finance Centres (OFCs). Since the late 1990s small countries and territories have been encouraged and pressured by multilateral organisations and supranational institutions to exchange information on civil and criminal tax matters. Interview based research in Australia, Andorra, Guernsey, Samoa and Singapore has been carried out to determine how OFC clients have reacted to these initiatives along with their impacts on the offshore sector, including local economies and societies. This paper shows that these international programs have caused contraction and reorganisation in leading OFCs. However, their diverse clientele and access to established markets for global financial services continues to make them attractive locales for fund management, trusts, captive insurance and private banking. The effects on OFCs located in smaller, developing countries have been much more severe, with reports that these jurisdictions are facing major problems sustaining a share of the worldwide market for financial services and products. This suggests that because of the uneven consequences of international efforts to regulate offshore finance in selected jurisdictions, these initiatives may actually increase tax competition rather than reduce it, at least in the short term. For multilateral policies to be effective, it may well be necessary for wealthy and poor nations, including OFCs (which include some of the world's poorest and wealthiest jurisdictions) to determine if tax competition contributes to or ameliorates the inconsistencies and contradictions of globalisation and the uneven development that it produces on a worldwide scale.     

BAD taxation: Disintermediation and illiquidity in a bank account debits tax model

This paper uses a dynamic general equilibrium model to study the economic effects of bank account debits (BAD) taxation. Australia and various Latin American countries have levied or levy BAD taxes. Aspects such as financial disintermediation, market illiquidity, and impacts on dividend and interest rates are considered. Part of the BAD tax revenue may be fictitious, due to increased interest payments on government debt. The Brazilian BAD tax (CPMF) experience is evaluated. The empirical analysis confirms some theoretical predictions. Incidence base over GDP appears to be sensitive to the tax rate, possibly engendering a Laffer curve. The tax may also cause real interest rates to increase. Furthermore, the deadweight losses are relatively large, even if revenues are small. The theoretical and empirical results suggest that the BAD tax is not adequate for revenue collection. JEL Code E62 · H20     

Optimal fiscal policy with environmental tax and pollution abatement spending in a model with utility-enhancing environmental quality: lessons from Bulgaria

This paper characterized optimal fiscal policy in the presence of pollution, and evaluated it relative to the observed one in Bulgaria. To this end, a dynamic general-equilibrium model is calibrated to Bulgarian data. The main findings are: (i) The optimal steady-state income tax rate is zero; (ii) the benevolent Ramsey planner provides 20% higher utility-enhancing environmental quality; (iii) the optimal level of carbon taxes is almost three times higher, and the optimal level of abatement spending is six times higher; (iv) the optimal steady-state consumption tax is twice lower.     

The cost of capital and optimal financing policy in a dynamic setting

This paper revisits the Modigliani–Miller propositions on the optimal financing policy and cost of capital in a dynamic setting. In an environment without taxes and bankruptcy costs, the results are generally consistent with the Modigliani–Miller Propositions 1 and 2. However, the first proposition should be presented and interpreted more carefully, as given firm characteristics, there is only one optimal capital structure. Thus, a firm’s capital structure is relevant. A relaxation of assumptions about either taxes or bankruptcy costs leads to conclusions that are generally different from those in Modigliani and Miller (1958). The model predicts that leverage and sales-to-capital ratios decrease but firm size and capital stock increase with the subjective discount factor of the firm’s manager if there are taxes and bankruptcy costs. The empirical analysis supports these predictions.     

Taxing multinationals in a world with portfolio flows and R&D: Is capital export neutrality obsolete?

This paper examines recent claims that capital export neutrality no longer serves as an effective principle for the taxation of income from foreign direct investment, due to the large and growing role played by portfolio capital in financing investment and to the recognition that R&D is an important determinant of international trade and investment. In our evaluation of these claims, we find capital export neutrality appears robust. Because both domestic and foreign activities may be financed with portfolio capital, and they both produce goods that compete in the world economy, there is no compelling reason to grant a lower tax to foreign income alone. Regarding the promotion of R&D or the entry of new competitors, cutting the tax on foreign income may be no more effective than cutting the tax on domestic income. A second focus of the paper is to calculate what the residual U.S. tax rate on active foreign income actually is. Based on 1990 data this rate is negative if foreign income is defined appropriately.     

Environmental tax incentives and corporate environmental behaviour: An unintended consequence from a natural experiment in China

Using the implementation of the Environmental Protection Tax (EPT) Law in China as a natural experiment, we explore the impact of environmental tax incentives on corporate environmental engagement. Evidence shows that, after the implementation of the EPT Law, there exists a significant improvement in the environmental performance of firms located in regions with increased EPT rates. However, our results reveal an unintended consequence that this effect is more salient for nonheavy-polluting companies rather than for heavy polluters that are more targeted by the EPT Law.     

Cost of capital and valuation in the public and private sectors: Tax,risk and debt capacity

Cost of capital and valuation differ in the private and public sectors, because taxes are a cost to the private sector but are only a transfer to the public sector. We show how to transform the after-tax private sector cost of capital into its pre-tax equivalent, for comparison with the public sector cost of capital. We establish the existence of a tax induced wedge between these two costs of capital. The wedge introduces a preference on the part of the private sector for assets with rapid tax depreciation, high debt capacity and low risk. We show that, in circumstances where an asset has identical public and private sector valuation in the absence of taxes, the tax induced difference in valuation is identical to the change in government tax receipts that results from having the asset owned by the private rather than the public sector. We provide some examples of distortions that result from failure to adjust for changes in tax revenues, and show how to effect such adjustment.     

A portfolio based theory of excessive foreign borrowing and capital control in a small open economy

We develop a simple model of portfolio choice in a mean variance framework to address the issue of international borrowing and financial crisis. Instead of adverse selection or moral hazard of lending and borrowing activities we emphasise the role of exchange rate movement. Syndicated borrowing by way of internalising the aggregate effect tends to restrict excessive borrowing from external source. However, this may undermine the welfare consequences by further aggravating the extent of risk undertaken in the process. There is a built-in externality in the model that leads to over exposure to foreign currency debt and readily calls for intervention by the government. Government intervention by way of a tax on foreign borrowing may help restrain the amount of external debt and implement the first best.     

Capital taxation and accumulation in a growing world economy with deficit finance

Prior analyses of the incidence of capital taxation have assumed that the government budget is balanced and changes in capital taxes affect either other taxes, transfers, or government expenditures. The general conclusion is that an increase in the capital tax rate will increase the gross-of-tax interest rate and decrease capital accumulation. This article examines the steady-state effects of capital taxation on the gross-of-tax interest rate and capital accumulation within a two-country model of overlapping generations, which allows capital taxation to directly affect government budget deficits. It is shown that, under the residence tax system, if the after-tax-interest rate is greater than the growth rate, an increase in the capital tax rate willdecrease the gross interest rate andincrease the capital-labor ratio. This result holds even under the territorial tax system, with some additional assumptions.     

Consumption Taxation and Endogenous Growth in a Model with New Generations

This article studies the implications of consumption taxation on capital accumulation in a one-sector endogenous growth model with finite horizons. A tax on consumption, when tax revenues are lump-sum rebated to consumers, redistributes income between living generations and future, still unborn, generations, and therefore depresses aggregate consumption and raises saving, stimulating capital accumulation and economic growth. If however the resources from taxation are used for financing unproductive public spending, the effect of the consumption tax on the endogenous growth rate disappears as no intergenerational redistribution of income occurs. Finally, a consumption tax hike accompanied by a compensatory reduction of public debt increases long-run economic growth and reduces the consumption-output ratio. Our results on consumption taxation differ substantially from those obtained within the endogenous growth literature.     

On the Equivalence between the APV and the wacc Approach in a Growing Leveraged Firm

While in a steady state framework the choice between the wacc approach ( Modigliani‐Miller, 1963 ) and the adjusted present value (APV) approach ( Myers, 1974 ) is irrelevant since the two approaches provide the same result, however, in a growing firm context the wacc equation seems to be inconsistent with the APV result. In this paper we propose a simple model to evaluate the tax savings in a growing firm in order to show under which assumptions the two approaches lead to the same results. We demonstrate that the use of the wacc model in a steady‐growth scenario gives rise to some unusual assumptions with regard to the discount rates to be used in calculating tax shields. We show that the widely used wacc formula, if used, as it is in most cases, in a growth context, implies that a) debt tax shield related to already existing debt are discounted using k_d; b) debt tax shield related to new debt, due to company's growth, are discounted, according to a mixed procedure, using both k_u and k_d. We discuss the inconsistency of such a discounting procedure and the preferred features of the APV approach.     

Multinational banks in the crisis: Foreign affiliate lending as a mirror of funding pressure and competition on the internal capital market

We investigate how the lending activities abroad of a multinational bank’s local and hub affiliates have been affected by funding difficulties during the financial crisis. We find that affiliates’ local deposits and performance have been stabilizing loan supply. By contrast, relying on short-term wholesale funding has increasingly proven to be a disadvantage in the crisis, which has seen inter-bank and capital markets freeze. By introducing a liable approximate measure for intra-bank flows, we detect competition for intra-bank funding between the affiliates abroad as well as an increasing focus on the parent bank’s home market activities. In addition, the more an affiliate abroad relies on intra-bank funding in the crisis, the greater its dependence on its parent bank having a stable deposit and long-term wholesale funding position. We consider changes in long-term lending to the private sectors of 40 countries by the affiliates of the 68 largest German banks. To obtain a more precise picture, we clean our lending data from valuation effects.     

The Friedman Rule in a Model with Endogenous Growth and Cash‐in‐Advance Constraint

This paper introduces money into an overlapping‐generations model with endogenous growth. The main message of the paper is that as long as the modified golden rule is attained, the Friedman rule is optimal. The result holds regardless of the ability of the government to internalize the externality and control the level of human capital. Other results include: (i) violation of the Friedman rule for a different second‐best environment wherein human capital accumulation is controlled but not physical capital accumulation and (ii) existence of a negative relationship between money growth rate and the economy’s endogenous growth rate.     

On perpetual American put valuation and first-passage in a regime-switching model with jumps

In this paper we consider the problem of pricing a perpetual American put option in an exponential regime-switching Lévy model. For the case of the (dense) class of phase-type jumps and finitely many regimes we derive an explicit expression for the value function. The solution of the corresponding first-passage problem under a state-dependent level rests on a path transformation and a new matrix Wiener–Hopf factorization result for this class of processes. Research supported by the Nuffield Foundation, grant NAL/00761/G, and EPSRC grant EP/D039053/1.     

On the distribution of dividend payments and the discounted penalty function in a risk model with linear dividend barrier

In the framework of classical risk theory we investigate a model that allows for dividend payments according to a time-dependent linear barrier strategy. Partial integro-differential equations for Gerber and Shiu's discounted penalty function and for the moment generating function of the discounted sum of dividend payments are derived, which generalizes several recent results. Explicit expressions for the nth moment of the discounted sum of dividend payments and for the joint Laplace transform of the time to ruin and the surplus prior to ruin are derived for exponentially distributed claim amounts.