Tax rates have fluctuated considerably since federal income taxes were introduced in the U.S. in 1913. This paper analyzes the effects of stochastic taxation on asset prices in a dynamic general equilibrium model. Stochastic taxation affects the after-tax returns of both risky and safe assets. Whenever taxes change, bond and equity prices adjust to clear the asset markets. These price adjustmen...

We examine the relation between stock price performance and the identity of the investors buying the shares in private placements of equity. We find that although the shareholders not participating in the placement experience post-issue negative long-term abnormal returns, the participating investors purchase the shares at a discount and earn normal returns. For the non-participating investors,...

Every scientist wants their research to have impact at some level, even if only realized far in the future. But a sense of vision and clear planning are needed today, to inspire everyone from potential investors to schoolchil-dren contemplating higher education options. Here, the case is made for roadmapping as a critically important way forward for plant science, and a practice that all scient...

This study examines the joint effect of disclosed measurement information and investor mindset on investors' judgments of estimate precision and firm value. Consistent with psychology theory, results reveal that short horizon investors adopt a relatively concrete mindset and long horizon investors adopt a relatively abstract mindset. As a consequence, disclosing that the fair value of an impair...

After negative shocks, investors with short trading horizons are inclined or forced to sell their holdings to a larger extent than investors with longer trading horizons. This may amplify the effects of market-wide shocks on stock prices. We test the relevance of this mechanism by exploiting the negative shock caused by Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy in September 2008. Consistent with our conjectu...

There are three parts of this broad agenda. The first relates to understanding how investors obtain and process information about firms. For a long time, the question of how investors receive information was either abstracted away from entirely (e.g. by assuming signals are received by all investors instantaneously), or modeled at a very high level (e.g. information diffuses slowly among invest...

This paper provides a dynamic rational expectations equilibrium model in which investors have heterogeneous information and investment opportunities. Informed investors privately receive advance information about future earnings that is unrelated to current earnings. In response to good advance information, stock prices increase and informed investors act as trend chasers, increasing their inve...

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...

We study the portfolio decision of a household with limited information-processing capacity in a setting with recursive utility. We find that rational inattention combined with a preference for early resolution of uncertainty leads to a significant drop in the share of portfolios held in risky assets, even when the departure from standard expected utility with rational expectations is small. In...