Essays on Capital Gains, Household Consumption and Corporate Payout Policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My dissertation consists of three chapters related to accrued capital gains. The first essay is concerned with estimating the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of accrued capital gains on owner-occupied housing in Canada. Its main methodological contribution lies in using a hedonic price equation to value these gains. The results suggest that for every 1 dollar increase in expected housing capital gains households increase total consumption by approximately 8.2 cents, and increase non-durable consumption by 6.2 cents.\nThe second essay of this thesis proposes a model of economic behaviour that can explain why corporations pay dividends despite their tax disadvantage relative to share repurchases. The key result is that firms must pay a premium above the intrinsic value of equity to repurchase shares, reflecting the lock-in effect caused by a realization-based capital gains tax system. In equilibrium, firms pay dividends whenever this additional cost is sufficiently high.\nThe third essay examines the effect of capital income taxation on corporate payout policy in Canada. The analysis makes use of a new dataset on share repurchases carried out by Toronto Stock Exchange listed Canadian corporations over the period 1987-2008. It also uses new estimates of Canadian average marginal tax rates applied to capital income. The results suggest that total payout is positively related to changes in both the corporate income tax rate and the capital gains tax rate, but is unaffected by the dividend tax rate. The results also suggest that share repurchases are positively related to changes in the dividend tax rate and negatively related to changes in the capital gains tax rate. Dividends are found to have a positive relationship with capital gains tax changes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".