For more than 50 years, researchers around the world have been searching for a solution to Blacks famous "dividend-puzzle". However, despite tremendous efforts in different fields of economics, the influence of taxation on the distribution policy of firms has remained elusive and is still...

This paper investigates the impact of the 2001 tax reform in Germany on dividend announcement returns. With this major tax reform, the full imputation system was replaced by the half-income system, which had a significant impact on the relative taxation of dividends and capital gains for most...

Based on a large panel data set of listed German firms we analyze the corporate payout behavior around the German Tax Reduction Act 2001 (GTRA). The GTRA considerably changed the tax preference of shareholders and consequently affected the attractiveness of different forms of payout. Using the...

This paper examines the impact of the German 2001 tax reform, where Germany switched from a full imputation system to a classical system. Theory suggests that both price drop ratios and trading volume decrease following the reform. We document a signi cant reduction in the valuation of net...

Tax effects on distribution policy have been at the center of debate in the theoretical and empirical literature for over half a century. Theoretically, there are two major schools of thought on the matter. The “traditional view” predicts an influence of taxation on firms' payouts, while the...

We examine the effect of a permanent change to a country corporate income repatriation tax system on corporate financial policies. In 2009 Japan and the U.K. switched from a worldwide to a territorial system for the taxation of repatriated foreign earnings. The new system effectively reduces the...

This paper investigates the effect at the bank and industry level of a 1996 tax law change allowing commercial banks to elect S-corporation status. By the end of 2007, roughly one in three commercial banks had either opted for or converted to the S-corporation form of organization. Our study...

The purpose of the paper is to study the effect of taxation on dividend payments and ex-dividend price-changes in Sweden during 1991-1995. Tax changes in Sweden during the 1990s were implemented in such a way that they provide an opportunity to include direct measures of the tax-treatment of...

We hypothesize that family firms’ dividend policies are in part determined by a consumption smoothing motive of family shareholders. Our paper tests this hypothesis using a Japanese dividend tax reform in 2011 which increased the dividend tax rate for only some groups of major family...