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Working Paper
Nothing is Certain Except Death and Taxes : The Lack of Policy Uncertainty from Expiring \"Temporary\" Taxes
What is the policy uncertainty surrounding expiring taxes? How uncertain are the approvals of routine extensions of temporary tax policies? To answer these questions, I use event studies to measure cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) for firms that claimed the U.S. research and development (R&D) tax credit from 1996-2015. In 1996, the U.S. R&D tax credit was statutorily temporary but was routinely extended ten times until 2015, when it was made permanent. I take the event dates as both when these ten extensions of the R&D tax credit were introduced into committee and when the extensions were ...
Newsletter
The Rise of Intangible Investment and the Transmission of Monetary Policy
Monetary policy acts on the economy primarily through its effects on investment spending. But the nature of investment has evolved over time: “Intangible assets”—such as intellectual property or software—play an increasingly important role in the modern economy. In this Chicago Fed Letter, we study the implications of this change for the transmission of monetary policy. We show that investment in intangible assets is less sensitive to interest rates than investment in tangible assets. This suggests that the secular shift toward intangibles has reduced the responsiveness of aggregate ...