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Journal of Finance Vol. 56 No. 1 2001

Capital Gains Tax Rules, Tax‐loss Trading, and Turn‐of‐the‐year Returns

James M. Poterba1,2; Scott J. Weisbenner3

1 National Bureau of Economic Research · 2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology · 3 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

open access

Abstract

Changes in the capital gains tax rules facing individual investors do not affect the incentives for “window dressing” by institutional investors, but they can affect the incentives for year‐end tax–induced trading by individual investors. Empirical evidence for the 1963 to 1996 period suggests that when the tax law encouraged taxable investors who accrued losses early in the year to realize their losses before year‐end, the correlation between early year losses and turn‐of‐the‐year returns was weaker than when the law did not provide such an early realization incentive. These findings suggest that tax‐loss trading contributes to turn‐of‐the‐year return patterns.

DOI
10.1111/0022-1082.00328
Volume
56
Issue
1
Pages
353-368
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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