Stockholder Tax Rates and Firm Attributes

This paper develops a rigorous theoretical model to assess when investor clienteles may be empirically identified using ex dividend day data and what firm attributes these clienteles should respond to. It then presents empirical results for the period 1963-1977 suggesting that (1) tax-based investor clienteles do exist, and are reasonably stable over time (2) these clienteles are strongly influenced by the dividend-price ratio, but insignificantly by direct measures of risk and other firm characteristics.