Taxation and household portfolio composition: US evidence from the 1980s and 1990s

This paper explores the relationship between household marginal income tax rates, the set of financial assets that households own, and the portfolio shares accounted for by each of these assets. It analyzes data from the 1983, 1989, 1992, 1995, and 1998 Surveys of Consumer Finances and develops a new algorithm for imputing federal marginal tax rates to households in these surveys. The empirical findings suggest that marginal tax rates have important effects on asset allocation decisions. The probability that a household owns tax-advantaged assets, such as tax-exempt bonds or assets held in tax-deferred accounts, is positively related to its tax rate on ordinary income. In addition, the portfolio share invested in corporate stock, which is taxed less heavily than interest bearing assets, is increasing in the household’s ordinary income tax rate. Holdings of heavily taxed assets, such as interest-bearing accounts, decline as a share of wealth as a household’s marginal tax rate increases.     

Population age structure and asset returns: an empirical investigation

"This paper investigates the association between population age structure, particularly the share of the population in the 'prime saving years' 45-60, and the returns on stocks and bonds. The paper is motivated by the claim that the aging of the 'Baby Boom' cohort in the United States is a key factor in explaining the recent rise in asset values. It also addresses the associated claim that asset prices will decline when this large cohort reaches retirement age and begins to reduce its asset holdings. This paper begins by considering household age-asset accumulation profiles. Data from the Survey of Consumer Finances suggest that while cross-sectional age-wealth profiles peak for households in their early 60s, cohort data on the asset ownership of the same households show a much less pronounced peak.... The paper then considers the historical relationship between demographic structure and real returns on Treasury bills, long-term government bonds, and corporate stock. The results do not suggest any robust relationship between demographic structure and asset returns.... The paper concludes by discussing factors such as international capital flows and forward-looking behavior on the part of market participants that could weaken the relationship between age structure and asset returns in a single nation."     

Capital Gains Tax Rules, Tax-loss Trading, and Turn-of-the-year Returns

Changes in the capital gains tax rules facing individual investors do not affect the incentives for "window dressing" by institutional investors, but they can affect the incentives for year-end tax-induced trading by individual investors. Empirical evidence for the 1963 to 1996 period suggests that when the tax law encouraged taxable investors who accrued losses early in the year to realize their losses before year-end, the correlation between early year losses and turn-of-the-year returns was weaker than when the law did not provide such an early realization incentive. These findings suggest that tax-loss trading contributes to turn-of-the-year return patterns.     

An aging society: opportunity or challenge?

"This paper steps back from the current political debate [in the United States] over the social security trust fund and examines the more general question of how serious a macroeconomic problem aging is and how policy should respond to it. We focus primarily on issues relating to saving and capital accumulation. We do not consider the broader question of whether the current U.S. national saving rate is too high or too low, but focus on the effect of demographic changes on the optimal level of national saving. In addition, we consider the effects of demographic change on productivity growth and the optimal timing of tax collections. Our general conclusion is that demographic changes will improve American standards of living in the near future, but lower them slightly over the very long term. Other things being equal, the optimal policy response to recent and anticipated demographic changes is almost certainly a reduction rather than an increase in the national saving rate."     

The effective tax rate and the pretax rate of return

This paper presents new estimates of the taxes paid on nonfinancial corporate capital, on the pretax rate of return to capital, and on the effective tax rate. The basic time series show that both the pretax rate of return and the effective tax rate have varied substantially in the past quarter century.An explicit analysis indicates that, after adjusting for different aspects of the business cycle, pretax profitability was between one and 1.5 percentage points lower in the 1970s than in the 1960s. The rate of profitability in the 1960s was also about one-half of a percentage point greater than the profitability in the 7 years of the 1950s after the Korean war.Changes in productivity growth, in inflation, in relative unit labor costs, and in other variables are all associated with changes in profitability. None of these variables, however, can explain the differences in profitability between the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.Looking at broad decade averages, the effective tax rate and the pretax rate of return move in opposite directions, lower pretax profits occuring when the tax rate is high. There thus appears to have been no tendency for pretax profits to vary in a way that offsets differences in effective tax rates.     

Redistribution by insurance market regulation: Analyzing a ban on gender-based retirement annuities

We illustrate how equilibrium screening models can be used to evaluate the economic consequences of insurance market regulation. We calibrate and solve a model of the United Kingdom's compulsory annuity market and examine the impact of gender-based pricing restrictions. We find that the endogenous adjustment of annuity contract menus in response to such restrictions can undo up to half of the redistribution from men to women that would occur with exogenous Social Security-like annuity contracts. Our findings indicate the importance of endogenous contract responses and illustrate the feasibility of employing theoretical insurance market equilibrium models for quantitative policy analysis.     

Economists tackle the challenges of a pandemic

Business Economics - The COVID-19 pandemic radically and rapidly changed the world, including the world of business economists. Eight NABE members employed in a wide variety of fields discuss how...