Taxation, Retirement Saving, and Investor Behavior

智力价值这个项目的一个组成部分是调查税收如何影响投资者关于投资哪些资产以及何时买卖这些资产的决策。该项目将从股息税和投资组合选择的分析开始。2003年的税改减少了股息收入的个人所得税负担，比战后任何其他税制改革都要大。这一税收变化可能会对高收入、否则高边际税率的投资者持有派息股票的意愿产生重要影响。通过比较各种消费者财务调查的数据，我们可以洞察到家庭投资组合是如何适应新税制的。这个项目还将调查有关共同基金资本收益分配的税收规则如何影响投资者行为。它将使用共同基金综合体中投资者交易模式的数据集来探索应税投资者是否不太可能在应税分配之前购买基金份额。该项目的第二部分将分析纳入固定收益养老金计划的资产和负债的市场估值。。这个项目将调查股票市场如何对资金过剩和资金不足的企业养老金计划进行估值，并考虑这种估值模式可能如何影响公司关于向其养老金账户缴款的金额的决定。税收和ERISA法规为为固定福利养老金计划提供资金创造了一套随时间变化的激励措施和要求。在20世纪80年代中期之前，公司能够从资金过剩的养老金计划中提取多余的资产，许多公司将其养老金计划用作进行免税金融投资的工具。然而，从1986年的税改法案开始，对资金过剩计划的养老金计划资产的分配征收消费税，现在设定为20%。这个项目将探索股市对这些税收的反应，以及投资者是否在20世纪80年代初对过度融资计划中的过剩资产给予了比随后几年更高的价值。最后，这个项目的最后一个组成部分将探索年金市场的运作，这是退休收入保障的重要来源，而且在未来可能会变得更加重要。这项研究的一个组成部分将调查年金人和一般人群死亡率之间的差异在多大程度上可以追溯到年金人和非年金人之间的社会经济差异，而不是年金人关于其未来潜在死亡率的私人信息。这项工作的第二部分将探索保险公司在定价政策中能够使用的一组特征的变化，例如最高法院1983年诺里斯诉亚利桑那州案的裁决后取消按性别划分的退休年金，如何影响年金市场的效率。广泛的影响美国人口老龄化表明，与储蓄和退休收入提供有关的问题将变得越来越重要，这既是政策制定者的担忧，也是应用经济学研究的前沿问题。本提案中描述的所有研究子项目都涉及了解公共政策，特别是税收，如何影响财富积累和退休收入支助的充分性。研究股息的税收处理和共同基金分配的税收规则如何影响家庭投资组合，是更广泛地分析税收效率成本的基石。由于超过3600万家庭拥有应税共同基金，与共同基金税收相关的扭曲现在可能会影响到相当大的一批投资者。对企业养老金资产估值和年金市场运作的研究与正在进行的关于退休收入保障的全国性辩论有关。最近几个资金不足的大型公司养恤金计划被转移到养恤金福利担保公司的前景，促使人们呼吁对公司养恤金缴费进行监管改革。这项研究的一部分将提供关于企业养老金缴费的潜在决定因素的意见，而另一项关于年金市场的工作将对年金市场在为个人账户社会保障体系中的资产提取融资方面可能发挥的作用提供见解。

Intellectual Merits One component of this project investigates how taxes affect investor decisions about whichassets to invest in, and when to buy and sell those assets. The project will begin with an analysis ofdividend taxation and portfolio choice. The 2003 tax reform reduced the individual income tax burdenon dividend income by more than any other tax change in the post-war period. This tax change could have important implications for the willingness of high income, and otherwise high marginal tax rate, investors to hold dividend-paying stocks. Comparing data from various Surveys of Consumer Finances will provide insight on the way household portfolios have adjusted to the new tax regime.This project will also investigate how tax rules on capital gain distributions from mutual funds affectinvestor behavior. It will use a data set on trading patterns by investors in a mutual fund complex toexplore whether taxable investors are less likely to buy fund shares just before a taxable distribution.A second part of this project will analyze the market valuation of assets and liabilities incorporate defined benefit pension plans. . This project will investigate how the equity market valuesover- and under-funded corporate pension plans, and consider how this valuation pattern may affect firm decisions about the amount to contribute to their pension accounts. Taxes and ERISA regulations have created a time-varying set of incentives and requirements for funding defined benefit pension plans. Prior to the mid-1980s, firms were able to withdraw excess assets from over-funded pension plans, and many firms used their pension plans as vehicles for making tax-free financial investments. Beginning with the Tax Reform Act of 1986, however, excise taxes which are now set at 20 percent were levied on distributions of pension plan assets from overfunded plans. This project will explore how the stock market reacted to these taxes, and whether investors assigned greater value to the excess assets in over-funded plans in the early 1980s than in subsequent years.Finally, the last component of this project will explore the operation of annuity markets,which are an important source of retirement income security and will probably become even moreimportant in the future. One component of this research will investigate the extent to whichdifferences between the mortality rates of annuitants and the population at large can be traced tosocioeconomic differences between annuitants and non-annuitants, rather than to private information that annuitants have about their potential future mortality. A second component of this work will explore how changes in the set of characteristics that insurance companies are able to use in pricing policies, such as the elimination of gender-specific retirement annuities following the Supreme Court's Norris v. Arizona decision in 1983, affects the efficiency of annuity markets.Broader ImpactsThe aging of the U.S. population suggests that issues related to saving and the provision ofincome in retirement will grow increasingly important, both as concerns for policymakers and astopics for research in applied economics. All of the research subprojects described in this proposal are concerned with understanding how public policies, particularly taxes, affect wealth accumulation and the adequacy of retirement income support. Studying how the tax treatment of dividends and the tax rules governing mutual fund distributions affect household portfolios is a building block for broader analysis of the efficiency cost of taxation. Since more than 36 million households own taxable mutual funds, the distortions associated with mutual fund taxation may now influence a substantial group of investors. The research on the valuation of corporate pension assets and on the operation of annuity markets is related to an ongoing national debate on retirement income security. The recent prospect of several large under-funded corporate pension plans being transferred to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC) has led to calls for regulatory changes with regard to corporate pension contributions. Part of this research will provide input on the potential determinants of corporate pension contributions, while the other work, on annuity markets, will generate insights on the possible role of annuity markets in financing the draw-down of assets in individual account Social Security systems.