Three essays on the law and economics of taxation and finance

Abstract

This dissertation empirically measures how the laws governing taxation and finance affect behavior and addresses how those laws should adapt to changing circumstances. The first chapter examines the effect of joint-taxation and “marriage bonuses” on marriage formation in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It uses a natural experiment to identify the effect and finds that tax incentives caused an increase in the marriage rate of up to 9%. The second chapter shows that idiosyncratic risk has spiked in every economic downturn since the 1920s and develops new models to explain this phenomenon. It then explores the implications of spikes in idiosyncratic risk for corporate and securities law. The third chapter compares the existing corporate tax to a hypothetical “cash flow tax” to determine how much of the corporate tax base is composed of the normal return to capital. It finds that the normal return to capital made up a relatively small percentage of the corporate tax base over the last 20 years. Because taxes on the normal return to capital are the most likely to be passed on to labor, this suggests that labor’s long-run share of the corporate tax burden is likely to be lower than typically thought.