TY  - JOUR
AU  - Sinn,Hans-Werner
TI  - The Vanishing Harberger Triangle
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 3225
PY  - 1991
Y2  - October 1991
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3225
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3225.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Hans-Werner Sinn
Ifo Institute -
Leibniz Institute for Economic Research
at University of Munich
Poschingerstr. 5
81679 Munich
GERMANY
Tel: 49-89-21802748
Fax: 49-89-397303;49-89-8506434 (home)
E-Mail: sinn@ifo.de
AB  - The paper presents a trapped equity model, but instead of studying how taxes affect corporate decisions when a sufficient amount of equity is already in the trap, it asks the question how does the equity get there. To be more specific, the paper analyzes how the double taxation of dividends affects the growth of a corporation that starts with no equity capital. One conclusion is that dividend taxes are distortionary <i>before</i> they are paid, but not <i>when</i> they are paid. Once the firm is in a stage of maturity where it pays dividends and dividend taxes, tax neutrality prevails. Thus the true intersectoral distortion resulting from corporate taxation is negatively correlated with the measured tax burden, and it is lower, the higher the distortion which estimates of Harberger type would predict. Another conclusion is that the King-Fullerton cost of capital formulae are not applicable in the case of immature firms. These formulas are based on the assumption that firms distribute their profits from marginal investment projects as dividends. However, immature firms strictly prefer a reinvestment to a distribution of profits. The reinvestment changes the cost of equity capital, and typically this cost is higher than a hasty application of the King-Fullerton formulas would predict.
ER  -