Law Commons^™

The Rational Exuberance Of Structuring Venture Capital Startups, Victor Fleischer

ExpressO

This Article takes the bursting of the dot com bubble as an opportunity to reevaluate the tax structure of venture capital startups. By organizing startups as corporations rather than as partnerships, investors and entrepreneurs seem to leave money on the table by failing to fully use tax losses -- especially since the vast majority of startups fail. Conventional wisdom attributes the lack of attention paid to losses to a "gambler's mentality" or optimism bias. I argue here that the use of the corporate form is, in fact, rational, or at least that there is a method to the madness.

I …

Taxing Sunny Days: Adjusting Taxes For Regional Living Costs And Amenities, Michael S. Knoll, Thomas D. Griffith

All Faculty Scholarship

Taxpayers pay tax on their nominal income without regard to their regional cost of living or the value of their regional amenities. Although commentators have argued that the income tax's failure to account for such differences is unfair - because residents of high-cost and low-amenity regions pay higher taxes than residents of low-cost and high-amenity regions - that argument is unpersuasive because migration tends to eliminate regional differences in living standards. The tax system's failure to adjust for regional differences is, however, likely to misallocate resources across regions in two ways. First, it is likely to discourage taxpayers from settling …

Simplifying The Transition To A (Progressive) Consumption Tax, Mitchell L. Engler, Michael S. Knoll

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Case For Repealing The Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax, Terrence R. Chorvat, Michael S. Knoll

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.