Marginal Stockholder Tax Effects and Ex-Dividend Day Behavior- Thirty-Two Years Later†
نویسندگان
چکیده
Since Elton and Gruber's (E&G) original article on taxes and ex-dividend price behavior was published in 1970, over 100 articles have appeared in the leading journals of financial economics examining whether prices fall by less than the dividends and, if so, whether or not the phenomenon is due to tax effects, market microstructure effects, or some other effect. The microstructure argument is the most serious alternative to the tax argument. All of the microstructure arguments state that the fall in stock price should be less than the dividend, regardless of whether the dividend is taxable or tax-advantaged. By testing exdividend effects on a sample of closed-end funds where dividends are tax-advantaged, we find that taxes should and do cause the fund price to fall by more than the amount of the dividend. This is consistent with a tax argument and inconsistent with a microstructure argument. Examining the sample of tax-free dividends, we find that the E&G and return measures change across two tax regimes exactly as theory suggests they should if taxes mattered. We then examine non-tax-advantaged closed-end funds. For these funds we should find the traditional ex-dividend tax effects: the fall in price on the ex-dividend date should be less than the dividend during periods when capital gains taxes are less than income taxes. This is what we find. Furthermore, the ex-dividend behavior of these funds generally moves in the direction we would expect across two changes in tax regimes. The taxable sample not only substantiates the tax effect, it also demonstrates that the fall in price greater than the dividend for closed-end municipal bond funds was not due to some peculiar aspect of either our methodology or the closed-end fund industry. Thirty-two years after E&G's original study, we find new and compelling evidence that taxes play an important part in affecting share price changes.
منابع مشابه
Marginal Stockholder Tax Effects and Ex-Dividend-Day Price Behavior: Evidence from Taxable versus Non-taxable Closed-End Funds
متن کامل
Ex-Dividend Day Stock Price Behavior: The Case of the 1986 Tax Reform Act*
This paper analyzes the behavior of stock prices around ex-dividend days after the implementation of the 1986 Tax Reform Act that dramatically reduced the difference between the tax treatment of realized long-term capital gains and dividend income in 1987 and completely eliminated the differential in 1988. We show that this tax change had no effect on the ex-dividend stock price behavior, which...
متن کاملThe Effects of Taxes on Market Responses to Dividend Announcements and Payments: What Can We Learn from the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut?∗
This paper investigates the effects of capital gains and dividend taxes on excess returns around announcements of dividend increases and ex-dividend days for U.S. corporations. Consistent with standard no-arbitrage conditions, we find that the ex-dividend day premium increased from 2002 to 2004 when the dividend tax rate was cut. Consistent with the signalling theory of dividends, we also find ...
متن کاملEx-Dividend Day Returns when Dividend and Capital Gains are Taxed at the Same Rate
Due to the overwhelming international evidence that stock prices drop by less than the dividend paid on ex-dividend days, the ex-dividend day anomaly is considered a stylized fact. Two main approaches have emerged to explain this empirical regularity: the tax-clientele hypothesis and the microstructure of financial markets. Although the most widely accepted explanation for this fact relies on t...
متن کاملNew evidence of the impact of dividend taxation and on the identity of the marginal investor
This paper examines the impact of a major change in dividend taxation introduced in the United Kingdom in July 1997. The reform was structured in such a way that the immediate impact fell almost entirely on the largest investor class in the United Kingdom, namely pension funds. We find significant changes in the valuation of dividend income after the reform, in particular for high-yielding comp...
متن کامل