Search Results
Working Paper
Capital taxation during the U.S. Great Depression
Previous studies quantifying the effects of increased capital taxation during the U.S. Great Depression find that its contribution is small, both in accounting for the downturn in the early 1930s and in accounting for the slow recovery after 1934. This paper confirms that the effects are small in the case of taxation of business profits, but finds large effects in the case of taxation of dividend income. Tax rates on dividends rose dramatically during the 1930s and, when fed into a general equilibrium model, imply significant declines in investment and equity values and nontrivial declines in ...
Journal Article
North Texas income dip may reflect decline in education
Speech
Dividend policy and capital retention: a systemic “first response”.
Presentation by Eric S. Rosengren, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, for ?Rethinking Central Banking? Conference, Washington, D.C., October 10, 2010
Conference Paper
Dividend behavior of financially distressed savings institutions
Report
Why do stock prices drop by less than the value of the dividend? Evidence from a country without taxes
It is well documented that on average, stock prices drop by less than the value of the dividend on ex-dividend days. This has commonly been attributed to the effect of tax clienteles. We use data from the Hong Kong stock market where neither dividends nor capital gains are taxed. As in the U.S.A. the average stock price drop is less than the value of the dividend; specifically, in Hong Kong the average dividend was HK $0.12 and the average price drop was HK $0.06. We are able to account for this both theoretically and empirically through market microstructure based arguments.
Journal Article
Higher payout
Working Paper
How did the 2003 dividend tax cut affect stock prices and corporate payout policy?
We examine the effects of the 2003 dividend tax cut on U.S. stock prices and corporate payout policies. First, using an event-study methodology, we compare the performance of U.S. stocks to that of other securities that should not have benefited from the tax change. We find that U.S. large-cap and small-cap indexes do not outperform their European counterparts, nor REIT stocks, over the event windows, suggesting little if any aggregate stock market effect from the tax change. In cross-sectional analysis, high-dividend stocks outperformed low-dividend stocks by a few percentage points over the ...
Report
The impact of tax law changes on bank dividend policy, sell-offs, organizational form, and industry structure
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 analyzes the effect of this conversion on bank dividend payouts. It also examines the effect S-corporation status has on a community bank's likelihood of sell-off and measures a firm's sensitivity to tax rates based on its choice of organizational form. We document that dividend payouts increase ...
Working Paper
CEO overconfidence and dividend policy
We develop a model of the effect of CEO overconfidence on dividend policy and empirically examine many of its predictions. Consistent with our main prediction, we find that the level of dividend payout is lower in firms managed by overconfident CEOs. We document that this reduction in dividends associated with CEO overconfidence is greater in firms with lower growth opportunities, lower cash flow, and greater information asymmetry. We also show that the magnitude of the positive market reaction to a dividend-increase announcement is lower for firms managed by overconfident CEOs. Our overall ...
Working Paper
Optimal taxation of capital income in a growth model with monopoly profits
An extension of the standard neoclassical growth model, demonstrating that the optimal steady-state tax on capital income can be positive, negative, or zero, depending on the level of monopoly profits and the degree to which profits can be taxed.