Many bidders enter the Government of Canada securities auctions with short or long pre-auction inventory. We find that bidding strategies and auction performance vary with pre-auction ownership structure. Short and long bidders bid higher average prices and demand larger quantities than do...

Since World War II, direct stock ownership by households has largely been replaced by indirect stock ownership by financial institutions. We argue that tax policy is the driving force. Using long time-series from eight countries, we show that the fraction of household ownership decreases with...

We investigate if the proxy voting process transmits valuable information from shareholders to management. A simple strategic voting model is developed and tested in a large sample of management proposals. The evidence suggests that voting is strategic in the sense that shareholders take into...

We estimate the costly-arbitrage model of Boyd and Jagannathan (1994) using Norwegian stock market data. Taxable distributions take place at two separate dates, one that entails the distribution of an imputation-tax credit and another the distribution of the cash dividend. We find that the...

We study uniform price auctions using a dataset that includes individual bidders' demand schedules in Finnish Treasury auctions during the period 1992-99. Average underpricing amounts to 0.041% of face value. Theory suggests that underpricing may result from monopsonistic market power. We...

Swedish lottery bonds are valuable tax shelters before the tax reform of 1991. By trading around the coupon lottery, high-tax investors with capital gains from the stock market shift their tax liability to low-tax investors. The uncertainty of the coupon lottery and the effort of verifying the...