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.

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.

Personal Taxation, Portfolio Choice and The Effect of the Corporation Income Tax

Personal Taxation, Portfolio Choice and The Effect of the Corporation Income Tax
Author: Martin Feldstein
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1980
Genre:
ISBN:

Extending the traditional treatment of the corporate tax to an economy with a progressive personal tax fundamentally changes the analysis. While the corporate tax system (CTS) does increase the total tax rate on corporate source income for some investors, the exclusion of retained earnings implies that the CTS lowers the tax rate for high-income investors. Analyzing such an economy requires replacing the traditional "equal-yield" equilibrium condition with a more general portfolio balance model. In this model, introducing a CTS can actually increase the corporate share of the capital stock even though the relative tax rate on corporate income rises.

Personal Taxation, Portfolio Choice and the Effect of the Corporation Income Tax

Personal Taxation, Portfolio Choice and the Effect of the Corporation Income Tax
Author: Martin S. Feldstein
Publisher:
Total Pages: 13
Release: 2010
Genre:
ISBN:

Extending the traditional treatment of the corporate tax to an economy with a progressive personal tax fundamentally changes the analysis. While the corporate tax system (CTS) does increase the total tax rate on corporate source income for some investors, the exclusion of retained earnings implies that the CTS lowers the tax rate for high-income investors. Analyzing such an economy requires replacing the traditional quot;equal-yieldquot; equilibrium condition with a more general portfolio balance model. In this model, introducing a CTS can actually increase the corporate share of the capital stock even though the relative tax rate on corporate income rises.

Wealth and Portfolio Composition

Wealth and Portfolio Composition
Author: Mervyn A. King
Publisher:
Total Pages: 70
Release: 1984
Genre: Economics
ISBN:

In this paper, we examine a new survey of 6,010 U.S. households and estimate a model for the allocation of total net worth among different assets. The paper has three main aims. The first is to investigate the extent to which a conventional portfolio choice model can explain the differences in portfolio composition among households. Our survey data show that most households hold only a subset of the available assets. Hence we analyze a model in which investors choose to hold incomplete portfolios. We show that the empirical specification of the joint discrete and continuous choice that characterizes household portfolio behavior is a switching regressions model with endogenous switching. The second aim is to examine the impact of taxes on portfolio composition. The survey contains a great deal of information on taxable incomes and deductions which enable us to calculate rather precisely the marginal tax rate facing each household.The third aim is to estimate wealth elasticities of demand for a range of assets and liabilities. We test the frequently made assumption of constant relative risk aversion.

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.

Strategic Asset Allocation

Strategic Asset Allocation
Author: John Y. Campbell
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2002-01-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 019160691X

Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors—-both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities—-seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities—-both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks—-vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors.