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Economic Commentary

Safe-Harbor Leasing: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff

In August 1981 the U.S. Congress enacted the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERT A) to stimulate investment in plants and equipment through expanded investment tax credits and a more rapid method of depreciation. Before this legislation, firms that did not generate sufficient taxable income could not take full advantage of tax incentives for investment. Consequently, these firms faced an effective cost of capital some 10 percent to 30 percent higher than their more profitable counterparts. The 1981 tax-law revisions allowed low-profit or profitless firms to sell their tax benefits to more profitable firms. The intent of these new rules, called the safe-harbor leasing provisions, was to equalize the cost of capital for all firms, that is, to allow a more even distribution of tax incentives for investment under the U.S. corporate-income-tax code.

The views authors express in Economic Commentary are theirs and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland or the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The series editor is Tasia Hane. This paper and its data are subject to revision; please visit clevelandfed.org for updates.

Suggested Citation

Kerka, Amy. 1982. “Safe-Harbor Leasing: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff.” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Economic Commentary 10/4/1982.

This work by Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International