Tax effects and term structure measurement.
For investors in a given tax bracket, bonds with certain combinations of price and maturity may dominate other bonds. If markets are complete, S. M. Schaefer proved that a prohibition on short sales will give rise to tax-induced clienteles. Thus, bonds classified into groups by price and maturity may be held by investors in different tax brackets. Because of the tax advantages associated with discount bonds, there should be a tendency for high tax bracket investors to hold discount bonds and for low tax bracket investors to hold par and near-par bonds. An empirical consquence of this is that the after-tax term structure and implied tax rates may be different across different sets of bonds. The objective of this study is to test empirically for tax-induced clienteles in the market for government bonds with a regression methodology. Nonlinear least squares is used to simultaneously estimate the after-tax term structure and the corresponding implied tax rates. The estimation is performed on each group separately and on the entire sample. The null hypothesis is that the sets of parameters describing the after-tax term structure are equal across the groups. The alternative hypothesis, which will be termed the tax clientele hypothesis, is that sets of parameters are not equal across the groups.
Taxation of bonds, securities, etc. -- United States., Tax planning -- United States., Tax incentives -- United States.
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