Taxation, Retirement Saving, and Investor Behavior

知识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购买和出售这些资产的决定。该项目将开始与股息税收和投资组合的选择分析。2003年的税收改革减少了股息收入的个人所得税负担，比战后任何其他税收变化都要多。这一税收变化可能对高收入和高边际税率的投资者持有派息股票的意愿产生重要影响。比较来自不同消费者财务调查的数据将提供有关家庭投资组合如何适应新税制的见解。本项目还将调查共同基金资本收益分配的税收规则如何影响投资者行为。它将使用一组关于共同基金投资者交易模式的数据来探讨应税投资者是否不太可能在应税分配之前购买基金份额。本项目的第二部分将分析包含固定收益养老金计划的资产和负债的市场估值。.本项目将调查股票市场如何评估资金过剩和资金不足的企业养老金计划，并考虑这种估值模式如何影响企业对养老金账户贡献金额的决定。税收和ERISA法规为固定收益养老金计划提供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，许多公司将养老金计划用作免税金融投资的工具。然而，从1986年的《税收改革法》开始，对来自资金过剩计划的养老金计划资产的分配征收了目前定为20%的消费税。本课题将探讨股票市场对这些税收的反应，以及投资者在20世纪80年代早期是否比随后几年更重视超额资金计划中的超额资产。最后，本课题的最后一个组成部分将探讨年金市场的运作，年金市场是退休收入保障的重要来源，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在多大程度上之间的差异的死亡率的年金和一般人口可以追溯到年金和非年金之间的社会经济差异，而不是私人信息，年金对他们的潜在未来死亡率。这项工作的第二个组成部分将探讨保险公司能够在定价政策中使用的一系列特征的变化，例如在1983年最高法院诺里斯诉亚利桑那州案的裁决之后取消了针对性别的退休年金，影响年金市场的效率。更广泛的影响美国人口的老龄化表明，与储蓄和提供收入有关的问题出现了退休将变得越来越重要，既是政策制定者关注的问题，也是应用经济学研究的目标。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持的充分性。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3600万个家庭拥有应纳税的共同基金，与共同基金税收相关的扭曲现在可能影响到相当多的投资者。关于公司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老金计划被转移到养老金福利担保公司的前景，导致要求对公司养老金缴款进行监管改革。这项研究的一部分将提供关于企业养老金缴款的潜在决定因素的投入，而关于年金市场的另一项工作将深入了解年金市场在为个人账户社会保障系统中的资产提取融资方面可能发挥的作用。

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.