Essays on Tax and Environmental Policies.

International Taxation;Dividend Exemption;Tax Competition;Cap-and-Trade Programs;Economics;Social Sciences;Business;Economics

Hasegawa, MakotoSalant, Stephen W. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: International Taxation;    Dividend Exemption;    Tax Competition;    Cap-and-Trade Programs;    Economics;    Social Sciences;    Business;    Economics;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/99900/makotoh_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation concerns tax and environmental policy issues central to recent policy-making debates. Chapter I is written with Kozo Kiyota and concerns the design of international tax systems. In 2009, Japan introduced a foreign dividend exemption that exempts from home taxation dividends remitted by Japanese-owned foreign affiliates to their parent firms. This paper examines the effect of dividend exemption on profit repatriations by Japanese multinationals. We find the heterogeneous responses of Japanese multinationals to dividend exemption. Foreign affiliates with a large stock of retained earnings increased dividend payments more than other affiliates with the enactment of dividend exemption in 2009. However, the increase in dividend payments was not associated with foreign corporate tax rates.Chapter II is motivated by corporate tax reforms of OECD countries that tend to include both statutory tax rate reductions and base broadening (tax-cut-cum-base-broadening reforms). Analyzing an international tax competition model over tax rates and bases, I show that when the profitability of outward foreign direct investment increases relative to the domestic rent of a firm in the home country, the country undertakes a tax-cut-cum-base-broadening reform. I also show that if the domestic rent is large relative to the amount of income shifting by multinational firms at the symmetric equilibrium, larger countries set higher statutory tax rates and a narrower tax bases.Chapter III is written with Stephen Salant. Previous analyses of cap-and-trade programs regulating carbon emissions assumed that firms must surrender permits as they pollute. If so, then the price of permits may remain constant over measurable intervals if the government injects additional permits at a ceiling price or may even collapse if more permits are injected through an auction. However, no cap-and-trade program actually requires continual compliance. The three federal bills and California;;s AB-32, for example, instead require that firms surrender permits only periodically to cover their cumulative emissions since the last compliance period. We develop a methodology for analyzing the effects of such permit injections and show that anticipated injections of additional permits during the compliance period should have different effects than under continual compliance.