Recent theoretical approaches have linked shifts in firms' internal funds and investment spending, holding constant underlying investment opportunities. An important impediment to convincing tests of these models is the lack of firm-level data on the relative costs of internal and external...

We examine the hypothesis that dividend taxes are capitalized into share prices by focusing on investors' implicit valuations of retained earnings versus paid-in equity. Retained earnings are distributable as taxable dividends, whereas paid-in equity is distributable as a tax-free return of...