We develop an optimal tax-timing model that takes into account asymmetric long-term and short-term tax rates for positive capital gains and limited tax deductibility of capital losses. In contrast to the existing literature, this model can help explain why many investors not only defer short-term capital losses to long term but also defer large long-term capital gains and losses. Because the benefit of tax deductibility of capital losses increases with the short-term tax rates, effective tax rates can decrease as short-term capital gains tax rates increase.

ABSTRACT An investor receives utility bursts from realizing gains and losses at the individual stock level and dynamically allocates his mental budget between risky and risk‐free assets at the trading account level. Using savings, he reduces his stockholdings and is more willing to realize losses. Using leverage, he increases his stockholdings beyond his mental budget and is more reluctant to realize losses. While leverage strengthens the disposition effect, introducing leverage constraints mitigates it. Our model predicts that investors with stocks in deep losses sell them either immediately or after stocks rebound a little.

In response to how they are compensated, mutual fund managers who are underperforming by mid-year are likely to increase the risk of their portfolios toward the year-end. We argue that an increase in the liquidity of the stocks that managers use to shift risk can lead to an increase in the size of their risky bets. This in turn hurts fund investors by increasing the costs of misaligned incentives associated with delegated portfolio management. We provide both theoretical and empirical results that are consistent with this argument. We use decimalization as an exogenous shock to liquidity to identify causal effects.

We develop an optimal tax-timing model that takes into account asymmetric long-term and short-term tax rates for positive capital gains and limited tax deductibility of capital losses. In contrast to the existing literature, this model can help explain why many investors not only defer short-term capital losses to long term but also defer large long-term capital gains and losses. Because the benefit of tax deductibility of capital losses increases with the short-term tax rates, effective tax rates can decrease as short-term capital gains tax rates increase.

ABSTRACT We propose a tractable model of dynamic investment, spinoffs, financing, and risk management for a multidivision firm facing costly external finance. Our analysis formalizes the following insights: (i) Within‐firm resource allocation is based not only on divisions' productivity, as in winner‐picking models, but also their risk; (ii) firms may voluntarily spin off productive divisions to increase liquidity; (iii) diversification can reduce firm value in low‐liquidity states, as it increases the spinoff cost and hampers liquidity management; (iv) corporate socialism makes liquidity less valuable; and (v) division investment is determined by the ratio between marginal and marginal value of cash.