CORPORATE-TAXATION, RETAINED EARNINGS, AND CAPITAL FORMATION

How retained corporate profits affect capital formation is the subject of the paper. A distributed-lag model is set up to relate corporate saving to household consumption, rather than saving, because of deficiencies in saving data. Alternative equations, estimated from aggregate U.S. data for 1948-74, strongly suggest that undistributed corporate profits have no independent influence on consumption. Their effect, if any, works via expected capital gains which are treated as a component of wealth by households in making spending decisions. Implications of these results for tax policy, especially for integrating personal and corporate taxation, are also discussed. © 1979.