This paper studies the asset holdings of white American men near retirement age. Assets as conventional defined show no tendency to decline with age, in apparent contradiction of the life-cycle theory of saving. However, a broadened concept of assets which includes expected future pension...

This paper shows that, contrary to commonly held views, the provisions of the social security law actually provide strong work incentives for older men. The reason is that, for most workers, higher current earnings lead to higher future social security benefits. These incentives have been...

The paper is an empirical cross-section study of the retirement decisions of American white men between the ages of 58 and 67. predicated on the theoretical notion that an individual retires when his reservation wage exceeds his market wage. Reservation wages are derived from an explicit utility...

How do dividend taxes affect firm behavior and what are their distributional and efficiency effects? To answer these questions, the first problem is coming up with an explanation for why firms pay dividends, in spite of their tax penalty.This paper surveys three different models for why firms...

We argue that the tax-exempt status of municipal bonds provides little or no subsidy to capital investment by communities. Instead, the tax exemption simply provides arbitrage opportunities to high and low tax bracket individuals while leaving individuals in intermediate tax brackets essentially...

During the past decade, the inflation rate has been very high by historical standards, yet the U.S. tax law has yet to adjust to this fact. The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what degree the lack of indexing of the corporate and personal income taxes by itself ought to have resulted...

Dividends seem to be more heavily taxed than capital gains. Why then do corporations pay dividends rather than repurchasing shares or retaining earnings? Either corporations are not acting in the interests of shareholders, or else shareholders desire dividends sufficiently for nontax reasons to...

Models of corporate behavior normally assume that a firm acts in the interest of shareholders, and that shareholders care only about the returns they receive on the shares they own in that firm. But shareholders should also care about the effects of a manager's decisions on the value of shares...

This paper analyzes the effects of the federal tax structure on corporate financial and investment behavior. We first develop a model of corporate behavior given taxes, taking into account both uncertainty and costs of bankruptcy. Simpler models abstracting from bankruptcy costs had clear...

This paper explores the characteristics of individual portfolio holdings in a world economy with a unified securities market where there are many countries, each with its own tax rates and inflation rate. When nominal interest is taxable but income to equity owners is tax exempt in all...