Depreciation Inflation And The Taxation Of Income From Capital

Inflation, Tax Rules, and Capital Formation brings together fourteen papers that show the importance of the interaction between tax rules and monetary policy. Based on theoretical and empirical research, these papers emphasize the importance of including explicit specifications of the tax system in such study.

Income from capital receives uneven treatment in both the tax system and the loan markets. This affects almost every investment decision make by the individuals, business, and government and causes major disruptions in the economy. In this book C. Eugene Steuerle shows how the misallocation of capital results from the interaction of tax laws, the operation of the market for loanable funds, and inflation. He first analyzes the taxation of capital income, focusing on the distortions caused by tax arbitrage and on inflation-induced discriminations among both taxpayer and borrowers. The author then applies this analysis to several related issues. He concludes with a reform agenda that calls for the adoption of a broader-based, flatter-rate income tax.

Introduction -- Taxation of income from capital -- The U.S. tax system -- Effective tax rates -- Summary and conclusion.

Feldstein shows how systems of taxation influence the rate and nature of capital formation--key to the development of any economy. His identification of important economic and policy questions, adroit use of modeling and new data, and careful attention to dynamics make this book a powerful addition to the literature.

This important contribution to tax analysis presents seven related theoretical essays that examine the effects of capital income taxation on the behavior of firms. It is divided into three sections, focusing on optimal tax design, firm financial policy, and inflation. Taken together, the essays demonstrate the powerful role taxes play in shaping the behavior of American corporations, and also provide insights into the difficult task of tax reform. Auerbach's results suggest policies the government might adopt to promote the optimal accumulation of capital. He examines the implications for capital taxation of discrepancies between nominal depreciation rates and real economic depreciation, and suggests appropriate rules of thumb for determining when capital taxation is neutral among alternative investment projects. He also makes important contributions to the debate over the integration of corporate and personal taxes on capital income and to the behavioral puzzle of why corporations pay dividends to their shareholders.

The definition and measurement of the cost of using real capital as an input in production has been much discussed and approached in several ways in earlier literature. This present study attempts to give a unified treatment of the cost of capital services, with emphasis on its relation to the corporate tax system on the one hand, and to the production technology of the firm on the other. It provides a thorough discussion of capital as a factor of production, relating the measurement of the price of capital services to the measurement of capital stock.A parallel treatment of capital and its service price with a neo-classical technology and with a putty-clay technology is presented. The book also discusses and unifies different concepts of neutrality of income taxation presented in the public finance literature. Illustrations based on data for the manufacturing sector of the Norwegian economy are given, relating partly to the actual tax system and partly to more or less hypothetical tax reforms. The study is intended to serve as a reference for researchers in econometric model building, corporate investment behaviour, tax analysis, and national accounting.

Edited by Vito Tanzi, Director of the IMF's Fiscal Affairs Department, the book consists of nine studies pertaining to monetary-fiscal links in both closed and open economies.