Friday, May 27, 2004

James Poterba (MIT) has posted Taxation and Corporate Payout Policy (NBER Working Paper No. 10321) on the National Bureau of Economic Research web site. Here is the abstract:

This paper presents new evidence on how corporate payout policy responds to the differential between the tax burden on dividend income and that on accruing capital gains. It describes the construction of weighted average marginal tax rate series for the period since 1929, and it suggests that the enactment of the Job Growth of Taxpayer Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 should raise the after-tax value of dividends relative to capital gains by more than five percentage points. The impact of this change on payout depends on the elasticity of dividend payments with respect to the after-tax value of dividend income relative to capital gains. Time series estimates suggest an elasticity of more than three, and imply that the recent tax reform could ultimately increase dividends by almost twenty percent.

A non-technical summary is available in the June 2004 NBER Digest