Avoiding Taxes: Banks' Use of Internal Debt

This paper investigates how banks use internal debt to shift profits to lower taxed affiliates. Using regulatory data on German multinational banks I find that banks employ the debt shifting channel more aggressively than non-banks do. This becomes even clearer when I correct for conduit entities in internal debt financing: A ten percentage points higher corporate tax rate increases the internal net leverage by 5.63 percentage points, corresponding to an 18% increase at the mean.