This article demonstrates that investors' heterogeneous tax status implies that they value bonds differently at the margin. Due to asymmetric personal taxes, high-risk bonds generate a higher amount of taxable income than low-risk bonds and are, therefore, held by investors in low tax brackets....

Given recent public attention paid to high-flying Internet IPOs such as Yahoo and Amazon.com, we explore a product market motive for going public. We develop a model where consumers discern product quality from the stock price. The model predicts that only better-quality firms will go public....