The rapid growth of assets in self-directed tax-deferred retirement accounts has generated a new set of financial decisions for many households. In addition to deciding which assets to hold, households with substantial assets in both taxable and tax-deferred accounts must decide where to hold...

This paper explores the relationship between the after-tax returns that taxable investors earn on equity mutual funds and the subsequent cash inflows to these funds. Previous studies have documented that funds with high pretax returns attract greater inflows. This paper investigates the relative...

We use the Business Roundtable's challenge to the SEC's 2010 proxy access rule as a natural experiment to measure the value of shareholder proxy access. We find that firms that would have been most vulnerable to proxy access, as measured by institutional ownership and activist institutional...

Managers appear to manipulate firm earnings when they characterize pension assets to capital markets and alter investment decisions to justify, and capitalize on, these manipulations. We construct a measure of the sensitivity of reported earnings to the assumed long-term rate of return on...

This paper presents new information on the fraction of adjusted gross income, and of wages and salaries, that is reported by taxpayers in the top one half of one percent of the income distribution. This corresponds to roughly five hundred thousand households in the late 1990s. This paper relies...

Inequality in wealth among elderly households, and in particular the prevalence of very low wealth holdings, can be an important consideration in the design of social insurance programs. This paper examines the incidence and determinants of low levels of financial and total wealth using repeated...

Executors of estates for decedents in 2010 could choose between an estate tax regime and a basis carry-over regime. For most executors, this created a tradeoff between a current estate tax payment and a future capital gains tax liability for beneficiaries who inherited assets with...

This paper investigates the current tax subsidy to employer- provided health insurance, and presents new evidence on the economic effects of various tax reforms. It argues that previous analyses have overstated the tax subsidy to employer-provided insurance by neglecting the substantial and...

This paper presents new evidence on the level and distribution of income and payroll tax burdens for U.S. families over the 1979-1999 period. During this period, payroll taxes have become an increasingly important component of the tax burden for many low- and middle-income families. This paper...

This paper uses tax return data for the period 1951-1990 to investigate the rising share of adjusted gross income (AGI) that is reported on very high income tax returns. We find that most of the increase in the share of AGI reported by high-income taxpayers is due to an increase in reported...