T HE determination of marginal stockholder tax brackets is an important and unresolved issue in the economic literature. Marginal stockholder tax brackets play an important role in stock valuation models [ 1, 6, 14], in normative investment and dividend policy models [11, 16], and in descriptive capital allocation models [ 7, 8, 10, 12 ]. The purpose of this paper is to present and test a method of determining marginal stockholder tax brackets and to explore the implications of our findings for corporate investment policy, corporate dividend policy, and the assumption of market rationality. In the first section of this paper we expand upon the reasons for studying marginal stockholder tax brackets. In the next section we show how marginal stockholder tax brackets can be inferred from the ex-dividend behavior of common stock. In the third and fourth sections we compute marginal stockholder tax brackets and discuss their implications for capital theory.

In this article, the authors develop relative pricing (APT) models that are successful in explaining expected returns in the bond market. They utilize indexes as well as unanticipated changes in economic variables as factors driving security returns. An innovation in this article is the measurement of the economic factors as changes in forecasts. The return indexes are the most important variables in explaining the time series of returns. However the addition of the economic variables leads to a large improvement in the explanation of the cross-section of expected returns. The authors utilize their relative pricing models to examine the performance of bond funds.

Daily data from interdealer government bond brokers are examined for tax and liquidity effects. We use two approaches to create cash flow matching portfolios of similar securities and look for pricing discrepancies associated with liquidity or tax effects. We also look for the presence of tax and liquidity effects by including a liquidity term when fitting a cubic spline to the after‐tax yield curve. We find evidence of tax timing options and liquidity effects. However, the effects are much smaller than previously reported and the effects of liquidity are primarily due to high volume bonds with long maturities.