Did Dividends Increase Immediately After the 2003 Reduction in Tax Rates?

The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 reduces the maximum statutory personal tax rate on dividends from 38.1 percent to 15 percent. This study analyzes dividend declarations in the quarter following passage. Aggregate dividends rose by 9 percent when boards of directors first met following enactment. Consistent with the dividend changes being tax-motivated, they are increasing in the percentage of the firm held by individuals. Dividend changes also increased with insider ownership, consistent with managers acting in their own interests. However, these results are limited primarily to firms that made large, special dividends. We find little evidence of an increase in regular, quarterly dividend payments.

Capital Gains Taxes and Stock Reactions to Quarterly Earnings Announcements

This paper examines the impact of capital gains taxes on equity pricing. Examining three-day cumulative abnormal returns for quarterly earning announcements from 1983-1997, we present evidence consistent with shareholders' capital gains taxes affecting stock price responses. To our knowledge, this is the first study to link shareholder taxes and share price responses to earnings releases. The results imply that shares trade at higher (lower) prices when individual investors face incremental taxes (tax savings) created by selling appreciated (depreciated) shares before they qualify for long-term treatment. Unlike prior studies that have focused on price reactions in settings where shareholder taxes are unusually salient (e.g., tax law changes, turn-of-the-year trading, or tax-sensitive transactions), this study finds the imprint of capital gains taxes in a more general setting.

Did Firms Substitute Dividends for Share Repurchases after the 2003 Reductions in Shareholder Tax Rates?

This paper tests whether firms altered their dividend and share repurchase policies in response to the 2003 reductions in shareholder tax rates. We predict that firms substituted dividends for repurchases, because the reduction in dividend tax rates exceeded the reduction in the capital gains tax rates. As expected, we find substitution and find that it is increasing in the percentage of the company owned by individual investors, the only shareholders affected by the legislation. These findings are consistent with boards of directors considering the tax preferences of individual stockholders (particularly officers and managers) when setting dividend and share repurchase policies.

Malan: a mapping language for the data manipulation

Malan is a MApping LANguage that allows the generation of transformation programs by specifying a schema mapping between a source and target data schema. By working at the schema level, Malan remains independent of any transformation process; it also naturally guarantees the correctness of the transformation target relative to its schema. Moreover, by expressing schemas as UML class diagrams, Malan schema mappings can be written on top of UML modellers. This paper describes the overall approach by focusing on the Malan language itself, and its use within a transformation process

Un tour d'horizon des approches pour la manipulation des données du web

Le passage au web 2.0 a renforcé le principe selon lequel les données doivent être séparées de leurs présentations. En même temps, le nombre des formats de documents XML a largement évolué sur le web. Les bases de données sont également utilisées pour le fonctionnement des sites. Ces constats impliquent la mise en œuvre d’approches et d’outils associés dédiés à la manipulation des données du web. Certaines de ces approches travaillent directement sur les données, tandis que d’autres se basent sur les schémas de ces mêmes données. L’ingénierie dirigée par les modèles (IDM) forme également une approche candidate à la manipulation des données du web. Dans cet article, nous présentons et comparons les différentes techniques majeures de manipulation de données afin de mettre en exergue leurs avantages et leurs inconvénients pour le problème des données du web

Monetary Remedies for Victims During Illinois Criminal Cases

The Illinois Crime Victim's Rights Amendment, added to the Illinois Constitution by the legislature and the voters in 1992, includes a 'right to restitution'. The amendment spurred some new legislation, now within the Rights of Crime Victims and Witnesses Act. But most crime victims still have little chance for restitution or other monetary remedies during criminal cases. Other remedies include recoveries from a state fund guided by the Crime Victims Compensation Act and recoveries ordered at sentencing under the Unified Code of Corrections Act. The paper first examines the Illinois constitutional right to restitution and the three separate acts recognizing possible monetary remedies for crime victims during criminal cases. Upon concluding that the constitutional right to restitution has not been adequately implemented by the legislature or the courts, the paper looks to other American state approaches to crime victim recoveries. For Illinois it proposes that the three acts be combined into a single statutory scheme, organized by the stages in a criminal case. Integrated provisions would held better secure the goal of enhanced recoveries by crime victims established by the overwhelming majorities of constitutional amendment drafters and voters

Self-consistent simulation of quantum shot noise in nanoscale electron devices

An approach for studying shot noise in mesoscopic systems that explicitly includes the Coulomb interaction among electrons, by self-consistently solving the Poisson equation, is presented. As a test, current fluctuations on a standard resonant tunneling diode are simulated in agreement with previous predictions and experimental results. The present approach opens a new path for the simulation of nanoscale electron devices, where pure quantum mechanical and Coulomb blockade phenomena coexist