This paper examines the impact of capital gains taxes on equity pricing. Examining three-day cumulative abnormal returns for quarterly earning announcements from 1983-1997, we present evidence consistent with shareholders' capital gains taxes affecting stock price responses. To our knowledge,...

This paper tests whether firms altered their dividend and share repurchase policies in response to the 2003 reductions in shareholder tax rates. We predict that firms substituted dividends for repurchases, because the reduction in dividend tax rates exceeded the reduction in the capital gains...

This paper defines an intertemporal tax discontinuity (ITD) as a circumstance in which different tax rates are applied to gains and losses realized at one point in time versus some other point in time, and studies the effects of ITDs on market behaviors at the time of disclosures of firm...

This paper assesses whether insurers' state taxes reduce purchases of property-casualty coverage. Tests are conducted using state aggregates of insurer-level data from publicly-available, annual accounting reports for 1993, 1994, and 1995. A positive relation between self-insurance and state...

We hypothesize that, in their annual accounting reports, insurers allocate premiums and losses from multistate policies to reduce total state taxes. To test this prediction, we examine firm-level data, collected from the publicly-available statutory reports used to compute tax bases and filed...

We empirically document that stock prices moved inversely with dividend yields during the May, 1997 week, when the White House and Congress agreed on a budget accord that included a reduction in the capital gains tax rate. The share prices of firms not currently paying dividends increased...

Current U.S. law nets the total portfolio of realized capital gains and losses to compute capital gains taxes. Prior research, however, typically ignores the implication of this provision, i.e., the marginal tax rate for a specific gain or loss depends on the taxpayer's total portfolio of...

Mutual funds must disclose their portfolio holdings to investors semiannually. The costs and benefits of such disclosures are a long-standing subject of debate. For actively managed funds, one cost of disclosure is a potential reduction in the private benefits from research on asset values....

To our knowledge, this paper provides the most comprehensive analysis of firm-level corporate income tax expenses to date. We use publicly available financial statement information to estimate firm-level effective tax rates (ETRs) for 10,642 corporations from 85 countries from 1988 to 2007. We...

This paper contributes to our understanding of the determinants of price responses to inclusion in the S&P 500 by providing evidence consistent with capital gains tax planning impacting stock reactions. Tests are conducted on 426 additions from 1978-1999. We regress the returns on the first...