Investors with taxable portfolios sometimes delay the sale of appreciated stock to defer capital gains taxes. While this strategy does help to reduce taxes, it can cause the portfolio to become more concentrated over time, leading to higher overall volatility and lower long-term returns. This...

This chapter summarizes the current state of research on how taxation affects household decisions with respect to portfolio structure and asset trading. It discusses long-standing issues, such as the impact of differential taxation of income flows from stocks and bonds on the incentives for...

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...

We investigate how personal income taxes affect the portfolio share of personal wealth that entrepreneurs invest in their own business. In a reformulation of the standard portfolio choice model that allows for underreporting of private business income to tax authorities, we show that a fall in...