This paper works out the effect of capital gains tax and stock transaction tax on share prices. In the generality of cases, the equilibrium share price is shown to equal the discounted sum of future dividends. In this paper, we emphasize that tax policy is a driving force in determining the discount rate and market turnover rate also plays an important role in determining the effects of policy. We show that temporary changes in policy have little effect on current stock price; only perceived policy in the future has price effect. We also show that a permanent shift in tax policy exerts only level effect, but no growth effect, on stock price.
Using monthly data from Taiwan, our empirical results indicate that changes in stock turnover rate often leads changes in transaction tax, and both are positively correlated. This result implies that government policy often reacts to market volatility instead of the other way around. Since the data exhibit autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity, we employ a two stage ARCH(1)-M model as our empirical strategy. Our results show that the price effect of transaction tax is significant, with the expected change in future tax especially so. The results also indicate that expected stock returns have positive and important effects on market turnover rate. Overall, the policy effect on stock price depends on the tax rate, the degree of risk aversion, sensitivity of turnover rate to policy and the expected stock return.
The analysis so far assumes that the tax policy is certain, when in fact it is hardly the case. The 1989 fiasco and the recent flip-flop of the government are vivid testimonies of the volatile nature of the government policy. The third part extends the model to a stochastic environment and examines the consequences when a long-standing unequivocal tax policy suddenly and unexpectedly shifts to a stochastic regime. This type of regime shift seems to characterize the recent experience in Taiwan.
Our results show that the shape of the pricing function under stochastic regimes depend on the persistence of the tax process. For tax rates that are lower than the unconditional mean of the process, the price is lower than the certainty case because the expected tax rate is higher over this interval. As the tax process becomes more persistent, the expected duration of the tax rate lengthens and the pricing function becomes negatively sloped. Notice that the slope of the pricing function (i.e., the tax elasticity of the price-dividend ratio) is flatter than the certainty case because in a stochastic regime consumers always take into account the possibility of tax changes, no matter how small the probability is.