Portfolio Choices with Taxes

Portfolio Choices with Taxes
Author: Jennifer Huang
Publisher:
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2003
Genre:
ISBN:

I analyze the intertemporal portfolio problem of an investor who has access to both taxable and tax-deferred (retirement) accounts. In a complete-market setting, through a tax-arbitrage argument, I show that tax-deferred accounts have only a wealth effect on overall portfolio decisions through the effective tax subsidy provided, and the optimal location decision of where to place an asset is separable from the allocation decision of overall portfolio composition among different assets. Investors optimally hold only the asset that provides the highest effective tax subsidy in their tax-deferred accounts, and their optimal portfolio allocation is determined by reducing the two-account problem to a taxable-account-only problem with the wealth level adjusted for tax subsidies. I also provide heuristic rules to rank assets by their corresponding effective tax subsidies for application purposes. In incomplete markets when investors face borrowing and short-selling constraints, I first solve a reduced-form version of the general model to provide conditions under which the complete-market optimal location decision of preferring the higher-taxed assets in the tax-deferred account is violated, and derive analytical solutions for the optimal portfolio allocation by transforming the two-account problem into a mixture of two single-account problems (one with only a taxable account and one with only a tax-deferred account). For financial planning purposes, I also derive convenient "rules of thumb" to approximate theoretical results. I finally solve a version of the general model numerically both to access the performance of heuristic rules in approximating the optimal portfolio decisions, and to quantify the impact of tax-deferred investing on individual saving decisions.

Taxation and Portfolio Structure

Taxation and Portfolio Structure
Author: James M. Poterba
Publisher:
Total Pages: 68
Release: 2001
Genre: Economics
ISBN:

Overview of how taxation affects household portfolio structure. It begins by outlining six aspects of portfolio behavior that may be influenced by the tax system. These are asset selection, asset allocation, borrowing, asset location in taxable and tax-deferred accounts, asset turnover, and whether to hold assets directly or through financial intermediaries. The analysis considers how ignoring tax considerations may bias estimates of how other variables, such as income or net worth, affect the structure of household portfolios. The paper then describes the tax rules that apply to various portfolio instruments in a range of major industrialized nations. This illustrates the wide variation in the potential impact of tax rules on portfolio choice. Finally, the paper selectively reviews the existing evidence on how taxation affects portfolio choice. A small but growing literature, primarily based on the analysis of U.S. data, suggests that taxes have important effects on several aspects of portfolio choice. There remain a number of decisions, however, for which it appears difficult to reconcile household choices with tax-efficient behavior.

Biased Effects of Taxes and Subsidies on Portfolio Choices

Biased Effects of Taxes and Subsidies on Portfolio Choices
Author: Hagen Ackermann
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2014
Genre:
ISBN:

We study how taxes and subsidies affect portfolio choices in a laboratory experiment. We find highly significant differences after intervention, even though the net income is identical in all our treatments and thus the decision pattern of investors should be constant. In particular, we observe that the willingness to invest in the risky asset decreases markedly when an income tax has to be paid or when a subsidy is paid. We investigate this result further in a range of variations of the baseline experiment and find our main result to be largely robust. However, as we reduce the number of states of nature the bias weakens considerably.

Taxation, Risk, and Portfolio Choice

Taxation, Risk, and Portfolio Choice
Author: John R. Brooks
Publisher:
Total Pages: 51
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN:

Many articles in the legal and economic literature claim that a pure Haig-Simons income tax cannot effectively tax investment income. This is because an investor can use leverage to gross up her investments in risky assets such that the increased gain (or loss) exactly offsets any income tax (or deduction) on the returns to risk-taking. This article argues, however, that while it is possible for an investor to make such portfolio shifts, she almost certainly will not because of the increased risk of doing so.Central to any discussion of the effects of taxation on investment risk-taking is the meaning of risk itself. The central claim of this article is that a better conception of investment risk is the risk of loss and not merely the variance of returns. Applying this notion of risk -- one that is well supported in the finance literature but new to the taxation-and-risk literature -- to an investor's portfolio choice question shows that an investor will not increase her investment in risky assets by enough to offset the tax. As a result, there is an effective tax on investment risk-taking under a normative income tax.

Portfolio Selection with Multiple Assets and Capital Gains Taxes

Portfolio Selection with Multiple Assets and Capital Gains Taxes
Author: Lorenzo Garlappi
Publisher:
Total Pages: 54
Release: 2001
Genre:
ISBN:

We analyze the portfolio choice of an investor who can invest in tow risky assets (in addition to a riskless asset) and who is subject to taxes on realized capital gains. These taxes appear in the portfolio choice problem as a form of time-independent, endogenous transaction costs. Similar to the case of portfolio choice with transaction costs, the optimal strategy of the taxable investor contains a quot;no tradequot; region originating from the excercise of the option to defer capital gains taxes. This may lead an investor to hold a markedly undiversified portfolio, for reasonable parameter values. With multiple risky assets the investor is effectively holding a portfolio of tax-deferral options. The value of these options is considerable, in the range of 5-10% of the wealth of an investor with constant relative risk aversion. Such value is decreasing in the volatility and correlation of the assets and in the risk aversion. If the risky assets can be held only through a mutual fund, the investor incurs a cost due to the loss of flexibility whose magnitude is small when assets re positively correlated but can increase considerably as the correlation decreases.