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Economists generally agree that a basic characteristic of a good tax is economic neutrality. That is, a tax should not influence economic behavior unless it was intentionally designed to produce a specific effect. In this context, the economic effects of the current system of capital gains taxation in the United States have been the subject of considerable concern. Most researchers have concluded that the current system of capital gains taxation has an undesirable and destabilizing effect on the securities markets because the practices of taxing capital gains only when they are realized and, correspondingly, allowing tax deductions for capital losses only upon realization, presumably cause investors to defer the realization of capital gains and to accelerate the realization of capital losses. Based upon this behavioral assumption, many economists infer an effect on the securities markets.

Assuming that individual investors account for most odd-lot transactions, we examine oddlot purchases and sales around the turn of the year and find a pattern that is related to the well-known January effect in stock returns. A significant change in the ratio of odd-lot sales to odd-lot purchases occurs at the turn of the year, which supports the hypothesis that the January effect results from trading by individual investors. The trading patterns that we find are not due entirely to tax considerations.

We examine the behavior of common stock prices after a large change in price occurs during a single trading day and find evidence that the stock market appears to have overreacted, especially in the case of price declines; however, the magnitude of the overreaction is small compared to the bid-ask spreads observed for the individual stocks in the sample. We interpret this finding as being consistent with a market that is efficient after transactions costs are considered.

A recent article in this journal [1] described a model for the computation of taxadjusted true yields to maturity on discount bonds and explained the use of a computer routine implementing this model. Unfortunately, the translation of the computer program into equation form contained a number of notational errors. In addition, there was an equals sign missing from the third equation [1, page 267]. As a result, the reader, in attempting to implement the model as it was formulated in the original article, will probably fail.

Amihud and Mendelson (1986) and Constantinides (1986) provide a theoretical basis for the proposition that assets with higher transactions costs are held by investors for longer holding periods, and vice versa. We examine average holding periods and bid‐ask spreads for Nasdaq stocks from 1983 through 1991 and for New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) stocks from 1975 through 1989 and find strong evidence that, as predicted, the length of investors' holding periods is related to bid‐ask spreads. We also find that the relation between holding periods and bid‐ask spreads is much stronger on Nasdaq, where spreads are larger, than on the NYSE, where spreads are smaller.