The main purpose of this paper is to provide an assessment of the impact of the introduction of an alternative minimum tax (AMT) in Belgium with a focus on the impact on various distortions margins. In the process, we provide an up-to date account of the state of effective corporate taxation in...

We model the link between inequality and excessive risk taking. In the presence of increasing returns to tax avoidance, the middle class is willing to take non rewarded financial risk despite risk aversion. Electoral pressure may lead an incumbent politician to endorse this excessive risk taking...

This Paper analyses the interaction between corporate taxes and corporate governance. We show that the characteristics of a taxation system affect the extraction of private benefits by company insiders. A higher tax rate increases the amount of income insiders divert and thus worsens governance...

We consider the strategic timing of information releases in a dynamic disclosure model. Because investors don’t know whether or when the firm is informed, the firm will not necessarily disclose immediately. We show that bad market news can trigger the immediate release of information by firms....

We investigate whether short sellers are subject to the disposition effect using a novel dataset that allows to identify the weekly closing of short positions. Consistent with the disposition effect, the closing of short sale positions is strongly related to a proxy of Shortsale Capital Gains...

We investigate whether providers of high frequency news analytics affect the stock market. As identification, we exploit a unique experiment based on differences in news event classifications between different product releases of a major provider of news analytics. We document a causal effect of...

Barack Obama’s victory in the 2009 presidential elections in the United States is widely credited to his personal charisma and his extraordinary rhetorical powers, as revealed throughout the campaign. President Obama was inaugurated in the midst of the worst economic crisis in the country,...

We analyze how changes in government policy affect stock prices. Our general equilibrium model features uncertainty about government policy and a government that has both economic and non-economic motives. The government tends to change its policy after performance downturns in the private...

Aggregate stock market returns display negative skewness. Firm-level stock returns display positive skewness. The large literature that tries to explain the first stylized fact ignores the second. This paper provides a unified theory that reconciles the two facts. I build a stationary asset...

This paper analyzes the asset pricing implications of periodic cash payouts within the context of a stationary rational expectations model with heterogeneous investors. The periodicity of cash payouts provides a natural motivation for time-varying conditional volatility in stock returns. I show...