IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/btx/wpaper/0701.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Effects of Dividend Taxes on Equity Prices: A Re-examination of the 1997 UK Tax Reform

Author

Listed:
  • Stephen R Bond

    (Nuffield College, Oxford and Institute for Fiscal Studies)

  • Michael P Devereux

    (Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation and IFS)

  • Alexander Klemm

    (Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London)

Abstract

We re-examine the extent to which personal taxes on dividends are capitalised into the equity prices of domestic firms, using data from around the time of the 1997 UK dividend tax reform, which removed a significant tax credit for an important group of investors: UK pension funds. The tax-adjusted CAPM suggests that the impact should depend on an average of dividend tax rates across all investors, and that UK pension funds should reduce their holdings of the previously tax-favoured asset: UK equities. Given that UK pension funds are small relative to the total size of the world capital market, a small open economy-type argument implies that the main effect of the reform would be to reduce UK pension funds’ ownership of UK equities, with little impact on the price of UK equities. We present evidence which is consistent with these hypotheses. We discuss why previous research (Bell and Jenkinson, 2002) reached the different conclusion that this tax reform had a large negative impact on UK share prices.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephen R Bond & Michael P Devereux & Alexander Klemm, 2007. "The Effects of Dividend Taxes on Equity Prices: A Re-examination of the 1997 UK Tax Reform," Working Papers 0701, Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation.
    • Handle: RePEc:btx:wpaper:0701
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Business_Taxation/Docs/Publications/Working_Papers/Series_07/WP0701.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Seppo Kari & Jussi Laitila, 2015. "Nonlinear Dividend Tax and the Dynamics of the Firm," FinanzArchiv: Public Finance Analysis, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 71(2), pages 153-177, June.
    2. Geiler, Philipp & Renneboog, Luc, 2015. "Taxes, earnings payout, and payout channel choice," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 37(C), pages 178-203.
    3. Hail, Luzi & Sikes, Stephanie & Wang, Clare, 2017. "Cross-country evidence on the relation between capital gains taxes, risk, and expected returns," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 151(C), pages 56-73.
    4. Michael P. Devereux, 2008. "Taxation of outbound direct investment: economic principles and tax policy considerations," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press, vol. 24(4), pages 698-719, winter.
    5. Mishra, Anil V. & Anwar, Sajid, 2017. "Foreign portfolio equity holdings and capital gains taxation," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 54-68.
    6. Henrekson, Magnus & Sanandaji, Tino, 2016. "Owner-Level Taxes and Business Activity," Foundations and Trends(R) in Entrepreneurship, now publishers, vol. 12(1), pages 1-94, March.
    7. Giorgia Maffini, 2013. "Corporate tax policy under the Labour government, 1997–2010," Working Papers 1302, Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation.
    8. Giancarlo Corsetti & Michael P. Devereux & John Hassler & Gilles Saint-Paul & Hans-Werner Sinn & Jan-Egbert Sturm & Xavier Vives, 2011. "EEAG Report on the European Economy 2011," EEAG Report on the European Economy, CESifo, vol. 0, pages 1-176, February.
    9. Tobias Lindhe & Jan Södersten, 2012. "The Norwegian shareholder tax reconsidered," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 19(3), pages 424-441, June.
    10. Hodgkinson, Lynn & Partington, Graham, 2013. "Capital gains tax, managed funds and the value of dividends: The case of New Zealand," The British Accounting Review, Elsevier, vol. 45(4), pages 271-283.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:btx:wpaper:0701. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Dongxian Guo (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sbsoxuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.