Taxes and Off-Balance-Sheet Financing: Research and Development Limited Partnerships.
ABSTRACT: Research and development limited partnerships are a relatively recent alternative to the more traditional debt and equity funding of research and development costs. This paper provides an economic and empirical analysis of the factors that may motivate firms to select limited partnerships as a source of funding. The analysis uses a framework that relies on extant capital structure models and agency theory to derive empirically testable hypotheses. Results of the empirical tests are consistent with both a tax motivation and, to a lesser extent, an off-balance-sheet motivation for firms to use a limited partnership to fund their research and development costs. More generally, the analysis and results offer support for the clientele tax models of Miller [1977] and DeAngelo and Masulis [1980], and the analysis of taxes by Scholes and Wolfson [1984] and Maid and Myers [1985]. The off-balance-sheet results offer some support for agency model predictions.
- DOI
- 10.2308/tar-4496029
- Volume
- 62 (3)
- Pages
- 480-509
- Language
- en
- Export
- BibTeX
- Sources
- openalex crossref