Die Abgeltungsteuer auf Kursgewinne und der Steuerstundungseffekt in der Unternehmensbewertung

In Germany capital gains have to be taxed independently of the holding period, according to the withholding tax regulations. Nevertheless, investors can initially avoid taxation by not realizing capital gains. Then, taxes are postponed into the future. Thereby investors can make use of an interest-free tax loan (tax deferral). Equally beneficial would be the immediate realization of negative capital gains, if this leads to reduced taxes by balancing these losses against other gains. The potential use of interest-free tax loans leads to the necessity of making assumptions on the investors?? strategy with respect to liquidation when it comes to business valuation based on discounting future after-tax payments towards investors (DCF-methods). It will be shown how much firm value depends on these assumptions by taking alternative, inflexible and flexible strategies of investors into account. Our considerations generate a lower and an upper bound for the firm value, and easier to calculate medium values. The calculations are illustrated by a numerical example which is also the subject of a comparative static analysis.