In June 2005, a questionnaire survey was sent to 9000 companies in the Kansai Area (Osaka, Kyoto and Hyogo), the second largest economic block in Japan, with 2041 companies responding. This article introduces the results of this questionnaire survey. The greatest feature of this study is that,...

In inefficient stock markets payout policy may be directly relevant for stock prices, not only by way of announcement effects considered in signaling games. We show that paying out free cash flow, either as a dividend or via repurchasing shares, has in general a positive price impact and...

The relation between personal taxes and firm value has fundamental implications for understanding why firms pay dividends and how taxes influence capital structure choices. Assessing personal tax valuation effects also influences tax policy debates regarding the integration of corporate and...

This paper studies the taxation of non-listed companies and their owners in Finland. We first describe the main features of the Finnish tax system regarding the taxation of dividends from non-listed companies. We use firm-level data to illustrate how the tax incentives are reflected in firms’...

Using register-based panel data covering all Finnish firms in 1999-2004, we examine how corporations anticipated the 2005 dividend tax increase via changes in their dividend and investment policies. The Finnish capital and corporate income tax reform of 2005 creates a useful opportunity to...

The introduction of the 2006 Norwegian shareholder income tax was announced in advance, and it increased top marginal tax rates on individual dividend income from zero to 28 percent. We document strong timing effects on dividend payout on a large panel of non-listed corporations, with a surge of...

This study examines the relation between corporate governance practices measured by Transparency Disclosure Index (TDI) and dividend policy in Poland. Our empirical approach, constructs measures of the quality of the corporate governance for 110 non-financial companies listed on Warsaw Stock...

There is a lack of clear evidence of the ways in which dividend taxation affects dividend distributions and investment since the evidence is based mainly on the behaviour of large listed companies. This paper utilises a large register-based panel data set, where the vast majority of firms are...

Empirical evidence suggests that the Effective Marginal Tax Rate (EMTR) on income from capital has increased considerably in both the United States and the United Kingdom over the period 1982-2005. This evidence contradicts the corporate tax literature which predicts that the EMTR should instead...

A simple nonlinear structural model of endogenous belief heterogeneity is proposed. News about fundamentals is an IID random process, but nevertheless volatility clustering occurs as an endogenous phenomenon caused by the interaction between different types of traders, fundamentalists and...