tax exempt investors and the asset allocation puzzle abstract investors frequently hold equity in pensions and other tax exempt savings plans despite the prediction of the standard model that they hold only bonds we provide a new explanation for this empirical puzzle based on differences between tax exempt and taxable assets in the tax treatment of capital losses we show how limits on refundability of losses on taxable equities leads to diversity of investors preferences for corporate leverage on the basis of tax rates in the simplest equilibrium of the model tax exempt savers hold risky highly levered equities while low bracket taxable savers hold bonds and high bracket taxpayers hold relatively safe unlevered equities we discuss the implications of tax exempts for risk taking and agency costs within the firm

why are taxes so high in egalitarian societies in an analysis of the relative income or relative consumption hypothesis it is shown that if the ratio of agent i s consumption to agent j s consumption enters into the utility function a tax on labor income may increase welfare for all agents if pretax wage inequality is low all agents will unanimously be in favor of such a tax thus there will be a tendency for taxes to be high in societies where pretax wage inequality is low copyright 1995 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

some aspects of the taxation of capital gains abstract the analysis of the effects of capital gains taxation requires a careful modelling both of the details of the tax code and the imperfections in the capital market under the standard assumptions concerning perfect capital markets and under the standard idealizations of the tax code there are several strategies by which rational investors can avoid note only all taxes on their capital income but also all taxes on their wage income these strategies leave individuals consumption and bequests in each state of nature and at each date unchanged from what they would have been in the absence of taxes although certain detailed provisions of the tax code may limit the extent to which rational investors can avail themselves of these tax avoidance activities there are ways in a perfect capital market by which the effects of these restrictions can be ameliorated accordingly any analysis of the effects of capital taxation must focus on imperfect capital markets if individuals face limitations on the amounts which they can borrow and or if there are limitations on short sales then under some circumstances there is a locked in effect individuals do not sell securities which they would have sold in the absence of taxation but under other circumstances individuals are induced to sell securities that they otherwise would have held in order to take advantage of the asymmetric treatment of short term losses and long term gains a policy of realizing gains as soon as they become eligible for long term treatment dominates the policy of postponing the realization of capital gains provided the gains are not too large a simple general equilibrium model is constructed within which it is shown that the taxation of capital gains may increase the volatility of asset prices and lead individuals not to trade when they otherwise would while the analysis casts doubt on the significance of the welfare losses resulting from these exchange inefficiencies there are circumstances in which the tax leads to production inefficiencies e g terminating projects at other than the socially optimal date finally we argue that the focus of some recent policy debates on the short run revenue impact of a decrease in the tax rate on capital gains is misplaced even when the short run revenue impact is positive consumption may increase thus exacerbating inflationary pressures and private savings may decrease thus leading to a lower level of investment in the private sector moreover there is some presumption that the long run revenue impact is negative our analysis has some important implications for empirical research in particular it suggests that the impact of the tax is not adequately summarized by a single number such as the effective tax rate representing the average ratio of tax payments to capital gains moreover the impact of the tax cannot be assessed by looking only at reported capital gains and losses

ex day behavior tax or short term trading effects this study examines the behavior of share prices around the ex dividend dates before and after the introduction of the 1988 income and corporation taxes act that reduced substantially the tax differential between dividends and capital gains in the united kingdom we find that in the pre 1988 period when the differential taxation of dividends and capital gains is high ex day returns are positive and significant in contrast in the post 1988 period ex day returns are in most cases negative and insignificant further analysis reveals that while ex day returns are significantly related to dividend yield and to the length of the settlement period they are not affected by the commonly used measures of transaction costs such as the bid ask spread and trading volume or by the day of week month of the year type of dividend distribution or number of days to the actual receipt of the cash dividend we conclude that taxation affects significantly ex day share prices in the previous studies have documented that the risk adjusted abnormal returns on the ex dividend dates are positive and significantly related to the dividend yield the interpretation of these findings is however controversial the question relates to what category of investors sets ex day prices elton and

on the optimality of the nordic system of dual income taxation abstract in recent years the nordic countries have introduced a so called dual income tax which combines a proportional tax on capital income with progressive taxation of labour income the paper argues that this asymmetric treatment of the two types of income can be defended on pure efficiency grounds because the progressivity of the labour income tax serves to reduce the private return to human capital investment thereby offsetting the tendency of a proportional comprehensive income tax to discriminate in favour of such investment the analysis is based on an overlapping generations model of a small open economy where consumers face a trade off between investment in human capital and investment in non human capital extended versions of the model allow for liquidity constraints and an endogenous labour leisure choice

tax planning of married couples and intra household income inequality abstract this paper examines tax planning of married couples under separate taxation it shows that concerns about the intra household income distribution prevent couples from minimizing tax payments the empirical analysis exploits a specific feature of the german tax system which allows married couples to save taxes by deviating from the default symmetric payroll tax treatment and assigning favorable tax treatment to the primary earner and unfavorable tax treatment to the secondary earner based on a representative random sample of individual tax files we find that a couple is less likely to choose the tax minimizing treatment if tax planning is associated with a larger decline of the net of tax income of the secondary earner this applies regardless of whether the husband or the wife is the main earner however couples where the wife is the main earner are generally more reluctant to assign the more favorable tax treatment to the wife

optimal ordering for a probabilistic one time discount abstract we develop a model for a one time special purchasing opportunity where there is uncertainty with respect to the materialization of the discounted purchasing offer our model captures the phenomenon of an anticipated future event that may or may not lead to a discounted offer we analyze the model and show that the optimal solution results from a tradeoff between preparing for the special offer and staying with the regular ordering policy we quantify the tradeoff and find that the optimal solution is one of four intuitive policies we present numerical illustrations that provide additional insights on the relationship between the different ordering policies

the impact of regulation on input substitution and operating cost we investigate the impact of rate of return regulation on the substitutability between pairs of inputs where substitutability is measured using morishima elasticities of substitution mes and on operating cost theory does not provide a qualitative characterization of the impact of regulation on input substitutability although it does provide a basis for speculation we test our speculation using a 1977 87 panel of 20 u s interstate natural gas pipelines that were subject to rate of return regulation during the period we find that regulation increased the mes of each rate base input for the non rate base input and reduced the mes between the two rate base inputs and of the nonrate base input for each rate base input we also find that the

transaction taxes in a search model of the housing market abstract we incorporate transaction taxes in a housing market search model with endogeneous house prices and show that these taxes unambiguously create lock in effects that reduce welfare the lock in effects are larger at low vacancy rates seller taxes raise prices and buyer taxes lower them and this asymmetry helps to explain the differences in the welfare effects of the two taxes lock in effects are smaller with a buyer tax since the price reduction dampens the negative effect on search effort caused by the tax

taxation of capital gains on owner occupied homes the paper compares taxation on realization with taxation on accrual in the context of owner occupied housing it considers a model where the utility a household derives from housing relative to other consumption varies over the life cycle as there are sizeable transaction costs housing consumption will not even in the absence of taxes be adjusted continuously but at discrete intervals the focus of the paper is on tax effects on the length of these intervals the following results are shown u taxing true economic appreciation at the same rate as imputed rental income and other capital income will lead to a shortening of the intervals if the capital gains are taxed on accrual an increase in this tax rate holding other rates constant will lead to a shortening of the intervals if the capital gains are taxed only as they are realized an increase in this tax rate holding other rates constant may either lead to a lengthening or a shortening of the holding period shortening is more likely if transaction costs are large whereas lengthening will occur if the rate of price increase is high

assessing empirical approaches for analyzing taxes and labor supply recent surveys on the labor supply responses of men document a divergence in the estimates of substitution and income effects obtained using various estimation approaches generally studies accounting for nonlinear tax schedules in a static setting via a piecewise linear approach produce estimates that typically imply higher substitution and lower income responses than are suggested by empirical work applying other approaches this paper demonstrates that maximum likelihood estimation of a consumer choice problem with nonlinear budget sets implicitly relies on the satisfaction of inequality constraints that translate into behaviorally meaningful restrictions these constraints arise not as a consequence of economic theory but instead as a requirement to create a properly defined statistical model in the analysis of piecewise linear budget sets the implicit constraints required by maximum likelihood in estimation amount to imposition of slutsky conditions at all wage income combinations associated with kink points in the analysis of differentiable budget sets the tacit constraints invoked by maximum likelihood also involve inequality restrictions on slutsky terms the empirical work presented in this study supports the contention that these implicit constraints play a major role in explaining the discrepancies in estimates found in the literature on men s labor supply

what can we learn from the grand policy experiment lessons from so2 allowance trading stable url http links jstor org sici sici 0895 3309 28199822 2912 3a3 3c69 3awcwlft 3e2 0 co 3b2 tthe journal of economic perspectives is currently published by american economic association your use of the jstor archive indicates your acceptance of jstor s terms and conditions of use available athttp www jstor org about terms html jstor s terms and conditions of use provides in part that unless you have obtainedprior permission you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles and you may use content inthe jstor archive only for your personal non commercial use please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work publisher contact information may be obtained athttp www jstor org journals aea html each copy of any part of a jstor transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission the jstor archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long term preservation and access to leading academicjournals and scholarly literature from around the world the archive is supported by libraries scholarly societies publishers and foundations it is an initiative of jstor a not for profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology for more information regarding jstor please contact support jstor org http www jstor orgtue jun 26 16 25 17 2007

new perspectives on public finance recent achievements and future challenges abstract the advances in the economics of the public sector during the past quarter century have been as pronounced as in any field within economics public finance has become a rigorous branch of applied microeconomics incorporating the best thinking and most advanced tools of both theoretical economics and econometrics in the remarks below i will focus on a few key areas in applied and theoretical tax and expenditure policy drawing both upon the academic work of myself and others and my experiences in the policy arena both as chairman of the council of economic advisers and as chief economist of the world bank i shall address both the questions of what we have learned in the past few decades as well as the questions where further research is needed

investments in human capital wage uncertainty and public policy abstract the importance of risk characteristics of human capital for the design of tax and education policy is explored wages are uncertain and education while increasing the expected wage may increase or decrease wage variance the government has strong reasons to encourage human capital formation in the latter case partly due to the insurance effect of human capital and partly due to the way the individuals under a plausible restriction on prudence respond to changes in risk the analysis is illustrated using two models of education one where education helps the individuals make better occupational choices and a standard risk augmented becker type model

pareto optimality and competition there is a general consensus that u s financial markets are very competitive and efficient with prices quickly reflecting the available information there is also a widespread belief that these competitive and efficient markets enable the efficient allocation of scarce capital among alternative investment opportunities this belief is not based on direct observation it is virtually impossible to obtain the data concerning the joint probability distribution of returns to all possible projects which would be required for a direct assessment of the efficiency of the resource allocations to which the market gives rise rather it is based on the well known result that perfectly competitive markets generate pareto efficient resource allocations the object of this paper is to question that conclusion to show that even with apparently competitive and efficient markets resource allocations may not be pareto efficient

measuring permanent responses to capital gains tax changes in panel data the authors use panel data and information about differences in state tax rates to separate the effects of transitory and permanent tax rate changes on capital gains realizations behavior the estimated effect of permanent change is substantially smaller than the effect of transitory change the difference is even larger than differences between estimates from past micro data studies which have primarily measured the transitory effect and time series studies which have primarily measured the permanent effect the authors results resolve a long standing conflict between micro data and time series studies of how marginal tax rates affect capital gains realizations behavior copyright 1994 by american economic association

taxation with costly administration the concept of a tax technology is used here as providing a unified framework for analyzing both administrative activity by tax authorities and tax resisting activity by taxpayers this framework provides a simple formalization of adam smith s four components of tax costs administration substitution active noncompliance and passive compliance the model is used to derive policy implications concerning the proper measurement of the cost of public funds and concerning the criterion for optimal administration

the effects of taxation on the selling of corporate stock and the realization of capital gains this study provides the first econometric analysis of the effect of taxation on the realization of capital gains the analysis thus extends and complements the earlier study by feldstein and yitzhaki 1978 of the effect of taxation on the selling of corporate stock the present analysis using a large new body of data obtained from individual tax returns supports the earlier finding that corporate stock sales are quite sensitive to tax rates and then shows that the effect on the realization of capital gains is even stronger

taxation and the structure of labor markets the case of corporatism we propose an explanation for the wide variation in rates of taxation across developed economies based on differences in labor market institutions in corporatist economies which feature centralized labor markets taxes on labor input will be less distortionary than when labor supply is determined individually since the level of labor supply is set by a small group of decision makers these individuals will recognize the linkage between the taxes that workers pay and the benefits that they receive labor tax burdens are indeed higher in more corporatist nations while nonlabor taxes are actually lower there is also some evidence that the distortionary effects of labor taxes are lower in more corporatist economies

elasticities of substitution for a regulated cost function abstract this paper proposes a modification to the uzawa 1962 characterization of the allen partial elasticity of substitution under cost minimization to take account of the behavioral properties of the cost function for a firm subject to rate of return regulation

accrual equivalent marginal tax rates for personal financial assets this paper shows that the appropriate approach to calculating accrual equivalent marginal tax rates for nonaccrual taxes on personal financial investments is the relative reduction in the internal rate of return approach which equates the present values from the after tax returns from an investment under an accrual and a nonaccrual tax detailed comparisons are made with alternative approaches proposed by boadway bruce and mintz 1984 and by king and fullerton 1984 for the capital gains tax both find accrual tax rates that equate the present values of accrual and actual tax revenues fundamental problems are found with both alternative approaches

do after tax returns affect mutual fund inflows abstract this paper explores the relationship between the after tax returns that taxable investors earn on equity mutual funds and the subsequent cash inflows to these funds previous studies have documented that funds with high pretax returns attract greater inflows this paper presents evidence based on a large sample of retail equity mutual funds over the period 1993 1999 that after tax returns have more explanatory power than pretax returns in explaining inflows in addition funds with large overhangs of unrealized capital gains experience smaller inflows all else equal than funds without such unrealized gains a large capital gain overhang discourages both gross fund inflows and gross outflows but the inflow effect dominates the outflow effect

the determinants of capital gains tax compliance evidence from the rjr nabisco leveraged buyout abstract inability to observe both actual and reported capital gains has impeded studies of capital gains tax compliance this study overcomes such limitations through access to both confidential tax returns and internal shareholder records tests are conducted at the individual taxpayer level for associations between compliance rates for capital gains taxes generated by rjr nabisco shareholders during its leveraged buyout and income marginal tax rates socioeconomic characteristics and measures of the taxpayer s perception of the noncompliance penalty we find noncompliance decreasing in taxable income including rjr nabisco capital gains first dollar marginal tax rates self employment income rental income and other interest paid

economists and the welfare state abstract this paper constrasts the views of the welfare state of economists in the 1940s and 1950s with those of the current generation it is argued that economists as a profession in particular in the scandinavian countries have changed from being strong spokesmen for the welfare state to becoming much more critical the reasons for this are sought both in the expansion of the public sector in recent decades and in the development of economic theory in the areas of public finance insurance and incentives and public choice an attempt is made to evaluate the importance of the empirical and theoretical developments for the changing views of the welfare state

interest rates risk and imperfect markets puzzles and policies traditional theory emphasizes the key role that monetary policy can play through the manipulation of interest rates but there are several puzzles that cannot be reconciled with standard models these include the apparent constancy in interest rates over extended periods and changes at other times which appear unrelated to changes in technology and demography the cyclical pattern of movements in real interest rates the impact of nominal not real interest rate changes on real variables and the cyclical pattern of movements in interest rate spreads this paper reaches beyond the standard competitive equilibrium perfect information model of credit markets towards imperfect information models particularly those that focus on the determinants of bank behaviour of the standard models the money demand model is most deficient in understanding these puzzles the loanable funds theory and a generalized version of real productivity theory can be reconciled with imperfect information and markets and the consequent credit and equity rationing regimes help to explain the puzzles specifically banks may be insensitive to changes in monetary stance owing to risk aversion there are strong policy implications it is argued for instance that in east asia raising interest rates exacerbated economic decline and rather than contributing to exchange rate stability may have induced capital flight as default risk increased lowering risk adjusted expected returns

the effect of taxes on male and female labor supply in sweden this paper estimates labor supply functions for married men and women in sweden using data from 1980 taking account of the complete form of individuals budget constraints both linear and quadratic supply functions are estimated with and without random preferences a novel feature is that for women the wage rate and labor supply functions are estimated simultaneously using a full information maximum likelihood method this method yields substantially larger wage and income elasticities than does the previously used two step methods another result is that the quadratic supply function wage elasticities for men and women are virtually the same if the elasticities are evaluated at the same net wage rate and hours of work for men and women the estimated functions are used to calculate the effect of tax reforms

how burdensome are capital gains taxes abstract this paper uses capital gain realization data from individual tax returns to evaluate recent claims that sophisticated portfolio strategies permit investors to avoid capital gains taxes the results suggest important investor heterogeneity twenty percent of taxpayers with capital gains or losses face binding loss offset constraints another significant group of investors evades the capital gains tax prior to recent legislative changes forty percent of capital gains were unreported finally about forty percent of capital gains accrue to investors who report capital gains and face significant tax burdens as the traditional analysis of the capital gains tax suggests

effective tax rates and tobin s q abstract this paper clarifies the relation between the average and marginal effective tax rates using the notion of the change in tobin s average q the equation connecting the effective rates shows that corporate taxation can be represented by a mixture of two extreme tax rules one being a distorting pure corporate tax and the other a nondistorting cash flow tax the paper proposes new measures representing this feature

tax motivated trading by individual investors we study the stock trades of a large number of individual investors to investigate how tax incentives affect the realization of capital gains and losses we compare investors realization behavior in their taxable and tax deferred accounts and thereby identify the effect of taxes on trading decisions we reach four conclusions first we find clear evidence of a lock in effect for capital gains in taxable accounts relative to tax deferred accounts we find evidence of the disposition effect the tendency for investors to hold losses and sell gains in both types of accounts and especially at short holding periods the lock in effect is stronger for large stock transactions than for small ones second we find tax loss selling throughout the calendar year though it is most pronounced in december tax loss trading is more pronounced among investors who have realized capital gains elsewhere in the portfolio during the year third we observe substantial heterogeneity in individual investors propensity to trade controlling for this heterogeneity however does not alter the relation between a stock s past performance and the realization decision finally we find that relatively few investors repurchase stocks that they have sold at a loss even after the 30 day wash sale holding period has expired

an economic order quantity model with a known price increase and partial backordering abstract a constant unit purchase cost is one of the main assumptions in the classic economic order quantity model in practice suppliers sometimes face a known price increase in this paper we develop eoq models with a known price increase and partial backordering under two different assumptions about when the increase will occur we prove the concavity of the extra profit functions for both scenarios if a special order is placed just before the price increases a solution method is proposed and numerical examples are presented

optimal portfolio choice with wash sale constraints abstract we analytically solve the portfolio choice problem in the presence of wash sale constraints in a two period model with one risky asset our results show that wash sale constraints can heavily affect portfolio choice of investors with unrealized losses the trading behavior of such investors is to a large extent driven by the desire to realize those losses either immediately by sharply decreasing the holding of assets carrying unrealized losses or indirectly by increasing such holdings in order to prepare for a decrease in a future period to earn the tax rebate payment our findings are robust to increasing the number of trading dates and introducing a second risky asset and a correlation structure

regulation of administered prices an empirical analysis of the microeconomics of price movement in finland 1972 77 curiously enough the concept of administered prices launched by gardiner means in his 1934 report to the u s secretary of agriculture still shows up in discussions on price policy and control today almost fifty years since it was coined and three decades after the discussion2 in which it should have been buried even more astonishing is the fact that its spin off administered inflation a term introduced by the kefauver committee in 1957 3 is still a part of economic language in some instances in the basic formulation that of means in 1935 administered prices are not assumed to be explicitly linked with market power but simply prices set by administrative action and held constant for a period of time means 12 p 78 although the hypothesis in this form was based on no economic reasoning of acceptable clarity it might still be accepted for the simple truism it is clearly some prices will change more seldom than others since for one thing costs of price changes will vary as is intuitively clear and as shown by sheshinski and weiss 17 pp 294 95 the optimal strategy of a firm in an inflationary environment will consist of longer intervals between successive price changes the higher the cost of such a change is under some very special assumptions risk aversion may also serve as an explanation to a decrease in the number of price changes relative to the number of changes in cost as indicated by the results of schramm and sherman 1 5 4 the administered inflation hypothesis as forwarded by means in his 1957 testimony before the kefauver committee means 12 pp 101 29 and by

on income tax avoidance the case of germany abstract we present a micro estimate determining taxed income as a function of gross income and all major deduction options depending on household and asset categories it shows that tax savings strongly increase with increasing income resulting in an effective marginal tax rate 16 percentage points below the legislated one for the highest income groups this calls into question the intended distributional impact of progressive income taxation our estimate suggests aggregate income tax losses to the german fiscal authorities in the order of magnitude of 34 of wage and income taxes paid in 1983 relative to 1994 tax proceeds this percentage would amount to dm 105 b

behavior of the firm under regulatory constraint a recent article by akira takayama discusses an earlier paper by harvey averch and leland l johnson on fair rate of return regulation of public utilities although takayama p 255 agrees with averch and johnson s general conclusions that a firm will tend to increase its investment with the introduction of an active constraint on its rate of return he criticizes the a j argument as being confusing ambiguous and in error takayama then attempts a clarification and presents a new formulation which leads to the a j result quoted above this comment will discuss several of takayama s criticisms in addition to showing that the so called a j effect cannot be derived from the basic assumptions made by both averch and johnson and takayama 1 we will show that the very assumptions used to prove the a j effect by defining the region of x require an assumption that the a j effect exists in the first place

the influence of the economic approaches to regulation on banking regulations a short history of banking regulations this article highlights the theoretical foundations of the regulations at work in the banking sector and examines their responsibility in the onset of the 2007 2008 financial crisis drawing a parallel between the main changes in banking regulations since the 1960s and the evolutions in the economic analyses of regulation over the same period it shows that the shift from the public interest theory of regulation that prevailed until the late 1960s towards the private interest theory of regulation accounts for the substitution of micro prudential regulations for macro prudential ones and explains a paradigmatic change in the conception of the regulatory instruments of the banking authorities it also shows that although the outcome of several factors the 2007 2008 crisis was also a consequence of the fact that the economic analysis of banking regulations supported micro prudential regulations that fail to take the global features and impact of banking activities into account and have proved unable to recommend effective solutions in a context of crisis

estimated elasticities from regulated and unregulated cost functions abstract estimates of the allen partial elasticities of substitution aes for a regulated cost function smith 1981 are compared with those obtained from an unregulated cost function the aes for capital and variable inputs are reasonably similar but those between variable inputs differ significantly

tax progressivity income distribution and tax non compliance this article examines the determinants of tax non compliance when we recognise the existence of an imperfectly competitive tax advice industry supplying schemes which help taxpayers reduce their tax liability we apply a traditional industrial organisation framework to model the behaviour of this industry this tells us that an important factor determining the equilibrium price and hence the level of noncompliance is the convexity of the demand schedule we show that in this context this convexity is affected by the distribution of pre tax income the progressivity of the tax schedule and the way in which monitoring and penalties vary with income it is shown that lower pre tax income inequality as well as a less progressive tax code may cause more tax minimisation activities therefore the frequently advocated policy of reducing the highest tax rate may fail as a policy directed at improving tax discipline one way of offsetting the possible harm to tax compliance from a less progressive tax could be an adjustment of the penalty and monitoring functions

effects of capital gains taxation on life cycle investment and portfolio management we examine the impact of capital income taxation both accrual forms of taxation and taxation of realized capital gains on total savings and the demand for corporate financial instruments we find that investors may hold both debt and equity in the face of effective collection of capital gains taxation even in a flat tax system we also find that the two taxes will have substantially different effects on saving and consumption behavior making it unlikely that the tax structure can be summarized by any single equivalent accrual tax rate this paper examines the impact of income taxation on the demand for various corporate financial instruments focusing on unique features due to taxation of realized capital gains we take a life cycle view of investment behavior and examine how accrual and realization taxation jointly affect an individual s allocation of intertemporal resources we shall consider the impact on his demand for debt and equity showing that taxation of realized capital gains generates an intrapersonal tax clientele effect at any one point of time an individual will strictly prefer either to buy debt or equity but that choice may be different at different ages therefore many individuals will simultaneously hold both debt and equity we also find that any attempt to measure the effective capital gains tax rate will be difficult and that existing approaches appear flawed since they do not correspond to the pattern of distortions which we find in this explicit model of asset demand and saving this analysis deviates from earlier work on capital gains taxation in several substantial dimensions whereas much of the capital gains taxation literature focuses on how capital gains tax regulations generate arbitrage opportunities in perfect capital markets the analysis used below essentially assumes effective enforcement of the intent of capital gains taxation this is desirable since contrary to the perfect capital market implication capital gains tax revenues are nontrivial therefore in examining the nature of asset demand and choice it is reasonable to assume somewhat effective collection of the capital gains tax liabilities our analysis will assume completely effective enforcement to highlight the impact of capital gains taxation it will be clear that several types of leakages will not substantially alter the qualitative conclusions

a note on the optimal eoq for announced price increases in the infinite horizon huang et al 2003 used the cesaro limit of a savings function to determine the optimal special order in an eoq model with single announced price increases over an infinite horizon in this note we point out that the savings function is not cesaro summable more importantly no limiting argument for the cost function d t qs as t is necessary at all given that this function is periodic for which it suffices to optimize the integral of the function over any given period

capital gains taxation in an economy with an austrian sector abstract this paper examines the effects of a proportional capital gains in an economy with an austrian sector with wine and trees and an ordinary sector we analyze the effect of capital gains taxation on both an accrual and a realization basis on the efficiency with which resources are used within the austrian sector since time is the only input which can be varied in the austrian sector this amounts to looking at the effect of capital gains taxation on the harvesting time or selling time of assets accrual taxation decreases the selling time of austrian assets realization taxation decreases the selling time of some austrian assets and leaves it unchanged for others inflation further reduces the selling time of assets taxed on an accrual basis often but not always inflation increases the selling time of austrian assets taxed on a realization basis we also examine the effect of the special tax treatment of capital gains at death and find that the current u s tax system under which capital gains taxes are waived at death encourages investors to hold assets longer in contrast to these results which suggest that the capital gains tax can reduce the holding period of an asset we show that there is a sense in which such taxes at least when levied on a realization basis discourage transactions and increase holding periods it is never profitable to change the ownership of an austrian asset between the time of the original constraint and the ultimate harvesting of the asset for final use capital gains taxation diverts resources from the austrian sector to the ordinary sector the effects on the efficiency of the allocation of investment between sectors are complicated and not easy to summarize

the effect of marginal tax rates on taxable income a panel study of the 1986 tax reform act this paper uses a treasury department panel of more than 4 000 taxpayers to estimate the sensitivity of taxable income to changes in tax rates on the basis of a comparison of the tax returns of the same individual taxpayers before and after the 1986 tax reform the analysis emphasizes that the response of taxable income involves much more than a change in the traditional measures of labor supply the evidence shows an elasticity of taxable income with respect to the marginal net of tax rate that is at least one and could be substantially higher the implications for recent tax rate changes are discussed

tax evasion and capital gains taxation this paper uses time series data to investigate how changes in capital gains tax rates affect taxpayer compliance it finds that a one percent increase in the marginal tax rate reduces voluntary compliance by between one half and one percent these results confirm the findings of previous studies based on individual household data they also suggest that at least one quarter of the observed capital gain realization response to changes in marginal tax rates is due to changes in reporting behavior rather than portfolio behavior this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

marginal taxes and the asset portfolios of swedish households this paper focuses on the effects of marginal tax rates wealth income and a set of socioeconomic and demographic variables on the portfolio composition of households using detailed micro data on 2 000 swedish households in particular efforts are made to disentangle the effects of marginal tax rates on the portfolio behavior of households some econometric problems involved when estimating asset demand equations in the presence of incomplete portfolios are briefly discussed a final section examines the overall effect of marginal tax rates on asset demands by applying estimated discrete and continuous portfolio equations to compute different tax elasticities

efficiency based rank assessment for electric power industry a combined use of data envelopment analysis dea and dea discriminant analysis da abstract this study discusses a combined use of dea data environment analysis and dea da discriminant analysis to determine the efficiency based rank of energy firms this type of performance evaluation is important because we often have a difficulty in accessing a large sample on energy firms to derive reliable empirical results the proposed approach is useful in dealing with such a limited number of energy firms often found in previous dea studies on energy industries in the world the proposed approach uses dea to classify energy firms into efficient and inefficient groups based upon their efficiency scores then it utilizes dea da to assess their efficiency scores and ranks in this stage we can find an adjusted efficiency score for each energy firm the proposed approach provides us with the following analytical capabilities all of which cannot be found in a conventional use of dea in assessing energy firms first the proposed dea approach can avoid zero in all multipliers on efficient energy firms by incorporating scsc strong complementary slackness condition so that it can handle an occurrence of multiple reference sets and multiple projections the dea result classifies all energy firms into efficient and inefficient groups second dea da applied to the two groups evaluates all energy firms by an industry wide evaluation not depending upon a limited number of efficient energy firms in a reference set as found in a conventional use of dea the analytical capability can reduce the number of efficient energy firms third the proposed approach can provide their efficiency based ranking scores finally we can conduct a rank sum test based upon their ranking scores to obtain a statistical inference as an application this study uses the proposed approach to examine the performance of japanese electric power industry we find two economic implications one of the two implications is that no major change has occurred in the operational performance of japanese electric power industry because of japanese sluggish economy from 2005 to 2009 the other implication indicates that there are strategic differences in the operation of japanese electric power firms after the liberalization

cost efficiency of electric grid utilities in china a comparison of estimates from sfa mle sfa bayes and stoned cnls with the purpose of estimating the range of cost efficiency levels of the power grid sector in china we assembled a data set including 23 provincial power grid companies spanning from 2005 to 2009 and conducted an empirical study based on the sfa mle sfa bayes and stoned cnls methodologies empirical results show that the average values of efficiency from different models vary from 0 85 to 0 92 depending especially on the assumptions underlying inefficiency content further results demonstrate that there is exogenous technical progress during the sample period and per capita gdp of the province is negatively related to the costs of the electric grid company located in the corresponding province we hope this empirical study will contribute to the debate on an efficiency based regulation scheme which was introduced to the chinese electric grid sector on a pilot base in 2014

tax arbitrage and labor supply we examine how tax avoidance in the form of trade in well functioning asset markets affects the basic labor supply model we show that tax arbitrage has dramatic implications for positive normative and econometric analysis of how taxes affect work incentives

service quality in the electricity industry the role of privatization and managerial behavior abstract this paper analyzes the relationship between privatization and service quality in the electricity industry and tests the hypothesis that managerial behavior is a significant intervening factor the sample includes 31 italian distributors over the period 1998 2004 their quality performance is represented by continuity of supply an aspect of quality that is both contractible and regulated results of the empirical analysis suggest that the transfer of shareholdings to private investors does not lead to quality degradation the results also suggest that managerial dominance translates into a reduction in supply quality this effect is likely to be particularly strong for public sector utilities

capital vintage time trends and technical change in the electric power industry beginning with tinbergen in 1942 economists have employed a time trend in cost or production functions to represent the rate at which new technology is introduced into the production unit in sufficiently flexible models of the production process the time trend may be used to obtain estimates of the rate as well as direction of technical change the use of the time trend is generally defended on pragmatic grounds as no theoretical justification exists for assuming that new technology is introduced at a steady rate that is independent of a firm s investment in r d education capital of a more recent vintage etc in recent years alternatives to the traditional time trend have been sought to represent the rate at which new technology is introduced research in this area has been concentrated in the telecommunications industry where the stock of r d or the percentage of calls completed by direct dialing or modern switching facilities have been employed as technological indices by nadiri and schankerman 32 denny et al 14 and christensen et al 7 the latter two studies indicate that explicit technological indices provide a better representation of the pace of innovation than the time trend this conclusion must remain tentative however as it is not possible to determine what is the true direction of technical change in these studies this shortcoming is overcome in a recent study by kopp and smith 24 who compare the performance of time trends and explicit technological indices in a study using pseudo data generated by process analysis models their results unambiguously support the use of technologically explicit indicators of technical change and indicate that the use of a time trend may not provide a consistent estimate of the direction of technical change this study does not however shed any light on the ability of a time trend to accurately reflect the rate of technical change the purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of alternative technological indices on the estimated rate and direction of technical change in the electric power industry the performance of a time trend is compared with that of a vintage index computed as the average age of a firm s steam generating capacity this latter index is consistent with the notion that new technology is embodied in newly constructed capital an assumption sup

evidence on tax motivated securities trading behavior tax loss selling by investors in common stocks near the end of calendar years has been proposed as an explanation for the turn of the year effect in stock returns past analyses of this hypothesis have relied on inferential data we provide here some direct data from a compilation of over 80 000 actual common stock investment round trips by a sample of 3000 individual investors we find strong evidence of a concentration of loss taking trades late in the year and milder evidence of a concentration just prior to the dates when investments become eligible for long term tax treatment the question as to whether and in what manner the impostion of a tax on realized capital gains affects the securities trading behavior of investors who are subject to the tax has been a longstanding topic of research in the financial ecomonics literature the original attention devoted to the matter was motivated primarily by a concern about resource allocation and federal tax revenue consequences and was directed toward the phenomenon of what has been termed the lock in effect of a gains tax that issue has remained an important public policy one and continues today as part of the ongoing debate about appropriate strategies for reducing the federal budget deficit particular additional interest in the topic has emerged in recent years however because securities transactions undertaken systematically for tax reasons have also been proposed as part of the explanation for certain observed anomalies in historical common stock returns most prominently the well documented turn of the year effect our purpose here is to provide some new evidence that decisions by investors as to the timing of the realization of capital gains and losses from their common stock investments are significantly affected by tax considerations this evidence indicates that a difference in the tax rates applicable to realizations classified as short and long term influences the timing of individual investors trades and further that there is a clear tendency for trades by individuals which give rise to losses to be concentrated near the end of calendar which for them are also tax years while we cannot conclude that

tax arbitrage and the redistributive properties of progressive income taxation abstract contrary to the popular view this paper shows that tax arbitrage may reduce inequality we also show that tax arbitrage is likely to benefit individuals located at the tails of the income distribution at the expense of those located at the center

capital gains taxes and equity trading empirical evidence individual investors have an incentive to defer selling appreciated stock until it qualifies for tax favored long term capital gains treatment shackelford and verrecchia 2002 show that these incentives can affect equity trading around public disclosures this article provides some empirical support for their theory with evidence of price increases and equity constrictions around announcements of quarterly earnings and additions to the s p 500 index we find share returns rise and trading volume falls with the incremental taxes saved by deferring the sale of appreciated property the price increases however are temporary reversing in subsequent trading days the results are consistent with buyers believing the compensation to sell before long term qualification through higher prices is less costly than holding an inappropriately weighted portfolio this finding that personal capital gains taxes affect equity trading adds to a growing literature that challenges longstanding assumptions that firm value is independent of shareholders and their taxes

the effect of income taxation on labor supply when deductions are endogenous this paper extends the standard static model of labor supply and taxation to the case where people are able to legally avoid taxes through the use of itemized deductions tax deductible expenditures are treated as a hicksian composite good with a price for those who decide to itemize proportional to one minus the marginal tax rate estimation of the commonly used linear labor supply model extended to incorporate the additional composite good on a cross section of prime aged married men suggests that tax deductible consumption is an uncompensated substitute for leisure and complement with labor the impact of taxes through the relative price of deductible expenditures appears to be much stronger than through the net wage copyright 1992 by mit press

dynamic asset pricing effects and incidence of realization based capital gains taxes abstract many analyses of capital gains taxation assume that realization based taxes are economically similar to accrual based taxes in equilibrium however the distinctive implications of realization taxes for asset trading through the lock in effect are associated with distinctive dynamic asset pricing effects asset prices are increased by the current realization tax to partly offset the sale disincentive that the tax would otherwise impose the resulting division of the tax burden between buyers and sellers of assets is similar to traditional public finance models of excise tax incidence in product markets

optimal eoq for announced price increases in infinite horizon in this paper we consider an infinite horizon economic order quantity eoq model with single announced price increase with an option of placing a special order just before the price increase takes effect we extend earlier work where it is assumed that the special order is an integral multiple of the new eoq quantity in the process we show that when the assumption of integrality is not valid the earlier approach of minimizing the cost difference over a finite horizon is no longer valid and establish the periodicity of cost difference function next we show that the cesaro limit of the function exists and utilize that to derive the optimal special order quantity we find that the optimal special ordering policy is of s s type

regulated equity returns a puzzle abstract based on a database of u s electric utility rate cases spanning nearly four decades the returns on equity authorized by regulators have exhibited a large and growing premium over the riskless rate of return this growing premium does not appear to be explained by traditional asset pricing models often in direct contrast to regulators stated intent we suggest possible alternative explanations drawn from finance public policy public choice and the behavioral economics literature however absent some normative justification for this premium it would appear that regulators are authorizing excessive returns on equity to utility investors and that these excess returns translate into tangible profits for utility firms

the taxpayer relief act estate planning and resource mobility in u s agriculture agricultural resources tend to be owned by individuals in the later stages of their economic life if older agricultural resource owners tend to use resources less productively than younger owners then much of the resource base in agriculture may be inefficiently employed this article argues that u s capital taxation laws may be partly responsible for resource immobility capital gains taxation tends to reduce resource mobility as does the family business estate tax exemption the 1997 taxpayer relief act could exacerbate the immobility problem

does the investment interest limitation explain the existence of dividends abstract miller and scholes have shown that under certain conditions the federal income tax taxes dividend income at a rate no higher than the rate on capital gains tabulations of actual 1977 tax returns show that the special circumstances under which this can occur apply to recipients of two and one half percent of dividend income and that no dominant role may therefore be ascribed to their hypothesis in the determination of corporate dividend policy

income tax evasion labour supply and the equity efficiency tradeoff abstract this paper is an attempt to incorporate tax evasion into the analysis of optimum income taxation a model of variable labour supply with tax evasion is used to derive supply functions for labour in regular and irregular markets given taxpayer behaviour the government chooses tax rates penalties and the probability of detection to maximize a utilitarian social welfare function the results consist in the derivation of a formula for the optimum marginal tax rate and a characterization of the factors determining the choice between the penalty rate and the probability of detection as instruments for the control of tax evasion

pricing efficiency under rate of return regulation some empirical evidence for the electric utility industry the authors test quasi optimal pricing rules for rate of return regulation for a sample of electric utilities they estimate the regulated cost function and demand equations by class of customer for the sample to yield the cost and demand parameters required to assess the utility rate structures the results indicate that the price structure of electricity by class of customer is not quasi optimal and that welfare improvement might be possible under alternative prices searching for the price structure which satisfies the criteria they find that commercial users rates have been too high relative to residential and to a lesser extent industrial rates they note that commercial uses tend to be less organized and more poorly represented in the rate making process 16 references 8 tables

volume for winners and losers taxation and other motives for stock trading capital gains taxes create incentives to trade our major finding is that turnover is higher for winners stocks the prices of which have increased than for losers which is not consistent with the tax prediction however the turnover in december and january is evidence of tax motivated trading there is a relatively high turnover for losers in december and for winners in january we conclude that taxes influence turnover but other motives for trading are more important we were unable to find evidence that changing the length of the holding period required to qualify for long term capital gains treatment affected turnover investors responding to the tax incentives in the capital gains laws should produce predictable patterns in the volume of trading in a stock but not necessarily in its price this study uses past price patterns as a proxy to measure the incentives to sell or avoid selling a stock and observes trading volumes to estimate the extent to which investors respond to these incentives past price patterns may influence trading volumes for other non tax related reasons as well these are also considered we find that past prices influence current incentives to trade through both tax and non tax motives winners tend to have higher abnormal volumes than losers this would be expected if non tax related motives were predominant however the influence of tax related motives on trading volume is shown by seasonal variations in the relationship between past price changes and turnover as predicted by tax induced trading theories the volume of losers is higher than normal in december and the volume of winners is higher than normal in january we found no evidence that trading volume was affected by changes in the length of the holding period required to qualify for long term capital gains investors reactions to capital gains taxes are important for several reasons first a comprehensive understanding of investor behavior would include both price and volume understanding the relationship between taxes and volume is a fruitful and convenient method of contributing to this subject the resource allocation consequences of capital gains taxes are controversial in part because

policy watch cutting capital gains taxes from 1922 to 1986 long term capital gains were taxed at lower rates than other income generally by allowing a portion of long term capital gains to be excluded from taxable income while taxing capital gains at the same rates as other income has been hailed by some as a major accomplishment of tax reform it has been criticized by others as one of its main flaws as a result there have been proposals each year since 1986 to restore some type of capital gains preference these proposals have sparked a lively debate centered on three main questions would reducing the capital gains tax lower or raise federal revenues who benefits most from cutting the capital gains tax would lower tax rates on capital gains improve economic performance

bequest taxes and capital gains realizations abstract contrary to popular view capital gains do not escape taxation at death as they are subject to the estate tax the presence of the step up in basis increases the lock in effect of capital gains taxes as individuals are induced to hold assets until death this effect however is mitigated by the estate tax which applies to assets passed to heirs using a sample of matched income and estate tax records in a period that straddles significant changes in capital gains and estate tax rates the estate tax is found to have an unlocking effect on capital gains realizations the realization elasticity with respect to the estate tax rate is estimated at 0 36 in the basic model

regulatory restructuring and incumbent price dynamics the case of u s local telephone markets prior to the telecommunications act of 1996 many u s states restructured their regulatory framework by replacing rate of return regulation with competition in both the local exchange service and local long distance markets and adopting price regulation price caps and price freezes using a panel data set of incumbent firm prices for three services i investigate whether price regulation and differences in entry conditions affect incumbent operators rate structures i find that competition has prompted a significant amount of rate rebalancing by reducing the amount of cross subsidization present in local telephone markets in addition the added flexibility of price cap regulation speeds the rate rebalance effects of competition

trading volume for winners and losers on the tokyo stock exchange this paper examines trading volume on the tokyo stock exchange traditional theory suggests that taxes create strong incentives to delay realization of capital gains and accelerate realization of losses contrary to the theory we find strong evidence that turnover is higher for stocks with gains winners than for stocks with losses losers in particular the winner stocks of keiretsu firms tend to have high end of fiscal year turnover this is true even when realizing gains could result in higher tax liabilities we conclude that capital gains taxes have only a small impact on turnover in japan other non tax related motives especially window dressing appear to dominate investor behavior we find strong evidence that this window dressing is concentrated in the stock of keiretsu firms

the political economics of not paying taxes this paper considers redistributive as well as political consequences of tax avoidance when tax avoidance is possible the official tax rate does not necessarily correspond to what individuals actually pay this affects both redistributive outcomes as well as political attitudes towards taxation depending on the avoidance technology different political equilibria emerge when the avoidance possibilities are limited the classical conflict between rich and poor is sustained if the tax avoidance technology is more effective however the equilibrium outcome can change to a situation where a coalition of poor and the very richest favor a higher tax rate comparing the model predictions with data on income inequality and evidence of avoidance activity it comes surprisingly close to actual observations

capital gains tax policy and the behavior of common stock returns abstract consistent with the lock in effect empirically documented in the economic literature and developed in theoretical work by stiglitz we find evidence of an increase in stock market volatility following an increase in the capital gains tax rate we further observe a corresponding decrease in volatility subsequent to a reduction in the capital gains tax rate we also note an inverse relationship between stock market trading volume and the tax rate on capital gains that is further consistent with the lock in effect

symposium on organizations and economics m t r ost production in modern economies occurs within organizations and this production is regulated only to a limited extent by prices the size of some of the largest organizations like general motors or ibm or att if managers didn t they would be replaced and firms that didn t maximize value wouldn t survive accordingly what went on inside the black box was mere detail the behavior of the firm could be described completely without knowledge of those details

regulation capital vintage and technical change in the electric utility industry this paper presents estimates of the rate of technical change in the electric power industry over the period 1951 78 the estimated model directly incorporates the effects of rate of return regulation and uses both a time trend and a vintage index to represent disembodied and embodied technical change respectively the results indicate that disembodied technical change was the primary source of cost reduction during 1951 70 and that tighter regulation as represented by a one point reduction in the rate of return would have reduced the rate of technical change by an average of 1 2 during 1951 78 34 references 18 footnotes 3 tables

tax induced trading the effect of the 1986 tax reform act on stock market activity the end of favorable tax treatment for long term capital gains caused investors to reassess traditional tax induced trading strategies this study compares trading behavior in december 1986 and january 1987 with previous years our results indicate that these tax code changes had a powerful effect on trading behavior relative trading volume was considerably higher in december 1986 for long term winners but not significantly lower for long term losers results also indicate altered trading patterns based on shortterm gains in december 1986 and for long term winners in january 1987 the most sweeping revision of the united states tax code in many years became law in september 1986 one key aspect of that law was the elimination of the favorable tax treatment of long term capital gains under prior law capital gains on assets held at least six months were generally1 taxed at only forty percent of the rate applied to ordinary income under the new tax law assets sold after december 31 1986 are to be taxed with a few exceptions 2 at the same rate at which ordinary income is taxed this change represented the largest capital gains tax rate increase in at least half a century the purpose of this study is to assess the short run investor reaction to this change in the tax treatment of capital gains the nearly four month lag between the passage of the legislation and the effective date of the tax rate change gave investors ample opportunity to assess the law s consequences for their portfolios and adjust their behavior accordingly since investors are seeking to maximize the risk adjusted after tax return on their portfolio this record increase in capital gains tax rates is likely to induce significant changes in investment strategy the extreme sensitivity of capital gains realizations to the capital gains tax rate by holders of common stock has been frequently demonstrated a permanent or long term and recurring investor response is evidenced by the findings of