How do taxes affect the trading behavior of private investors? Evidence from individual portfolio data

Florian Buhlmann, Philipp Doerrenberg, Johannes Voget and Benjamin Loos

No 20-047, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: We exploit a large reform of capital-gains taxation in Germany combined with portfolio-level daily panel data to study the causal effect of taxes on individual stock-trading behavior and the disposition effect. We find substantial spikes in selling probabilities around an intertemporal tax discontinuity, and no such spikes after the abolishment of the discontinuity. Using difference-in-bunching methods, non-parametric regressions and effective tax rates, we quantify the tax effect and identify interesting patterns of heterogeneity. We further find evidence that the well-established disposition effect is strongly affected by the tax discontinuity through tax motivated selling of both gains and losses.

Keywords: Taxation; Capital-gains; Private investors; Trading Behavior; Disposition Effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C41 D14 G11 H20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/225078/1/1735550132.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:20047

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().