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.     

Competition and Appraisal Inflation

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics - In mortgage debt contracts, real property serves as collateral and the terms of mortgage financing are largely conditional on the certification of...     

DIRECT EVIDENCE ON THE MARKET‐DRIVEN ACQUISITION THEORY

We provide direct empirical evidence that share overvaluation is an important motive for firms to make stock acquisitions. We find that more overvalued firms are more likely to acquire with stock, and acquirers are more overvalued in successful stock mergers than in withdrawn mergers. Acquirers' overvaluation, on average, exceeds the targets' premium‐adjusted overvaluation. Shareholders of stock acquirers, whose overvaluation is greater than their targets' premium‐adjusted overvaluation, realize sustained wealth gains from one day before the merger announcement up to three years after the merger completion, as compared with a matching sample of similarly overvalued but nonacquiring firms.     

Puerto Rico in the 1970s and 1980s: Crisis of the Development Model

In his institutional economic essay on "Taxation in Chicago and Philadelphia" (published in 1895) John R. Commons addresses property tax assessment. He demonstrates that the revenue is not just a question of the tax rate and the distribution of the tax burden but also one of constitutional requirements and how the taxes are assessed. His essay is reviewed with regard to his later work, subsequent Institutional Economics, and the social provisioning of the market for professional tax advice. The degree of liabilities is defining characteristics of the differences between the United States and Germany.     

印度不是中国的翻版

电子工业在中国和印度的发展显然将追寻两条不同的道路,原因在于这两个国家正在采取非常不同的经济发展模式。     

THE ENDOGENEITY OF INFORMATION ASYMMETRY AND CORPORATE FINANCING DECISIONS

Firms endogenize the extent of information asymmetry by choosing the optimal level and channels of direct communication with the capital markets. Firms choose more communication when they have a greater potential demand for external financing (characterized by higher growth, less cash, and higher leverage). We demonstrate that a higher level of communication is associated with a higher probability of equity issuance. We further document that the previously observed negative market reaction to seasoned equity offering (SEO) announcements is attributed only to low‐communication firms; high‐communication SEO firms experience no significant adverse market reaction.     

Low information nash equilibria for oligopolistic markets

This paper deals with an infinite horizon n firm oligopoly in which firms are assumed to have incomplete information about one another's actions and profit functions. An equilibrium concept is defined that is similar to the Nash non-cooperative equilibrium, but is suitable for the information assumptions of the model. The equilibrium uses a type of bounded rationality which makes firms' computations relatively easy. This is due to an implicit assumption that computation is costly and a Bayesian approach is prohibitively costly. This low information Nash equilibrium is proved to exist, and, in addition, an adaptive expectations decision process is described which, if followed by all firms, leads to the low information Nash equilibrium.     

Zoning Policy Changes and the Urban Fringe Land Market

This paper examines the effect of a zoning change on the land market in McHenry County, Illinois. One question addressed is whether zoning "follows the market." It is found that, for agricultural land, zoning does tend to follow the market. In addition, the effect of land prices on land use is examined. The results here, however, are mixed. In the initial years after the zoning change, a high relative price of residential land increases the probability that a parcel will be zoned residential. However, several years later, a high relative price of residential land decreases the probability that a parcel is zoned residential. This result suggests that it may take some time for a zoning change to have a significant impact on the local land market.     

The effect of zoning on land value

Two types of zoning are identified: externality zoning, which is designed to achieve a Pareto efficient pattern of land use, and fiscal zoning, which is designed to accomplish some other objective. (The latter, for instance, may be aimed at minimizing the tax rate in a community.) The paper shows that it is not in general possible using a priori theory to predict the sign (positive or negative) of the effect of either of these forms of zoning on aggregate land value in a community. It is shown, however, that under plausible assumption it can be argued that zoning as currently practiced in many U. S. communities probably has the effect of lowering aggregate land values in the communities doing the zoning.