Homestead exemptions to personal bankruptcy allow households to retain their home equity up to a limit determined at the state level. Households that may experience bankruptcy thus have an incentive to bias their portfolios towards home equity. Using US household data from the Survey of Income...

This paper examines the impact of thin capitalization rules that limit the tax deductibility of interest on the capital structure of the foreign affiliates of US multinationals. We construct a new data set on thin capitalization rules in 54 countries for the period 1982-2004. Using confidential...

This paper presents evidence of banks using accounting discretion to overstate the value of distressed assets. In particular, we show that the stock market applies far greater discounts to a bank’s real estate loans and mortgage-backed securities than are implicit in the book values of these...

This paper presents a model that relates a multinational firm's optimal debt policy to taxation and to non-tax factors such as the desire to prevent bankruptcy. The model yields the predictions that a multinational's indebtedness in a country depends on national tax rates and differences between...

The conduct of business activities in two or more countries creates opportunities for international profit shifting, while international tax rate differences create incentives. Using detailed information on both multinational firm structure and the international tax system, this paper examines...

Using a large international firm-level data set, we estimate separate effects of host and parent country taxation on the location decisions of multinational firms. Both types of taxation are estimated to have a negative impact on the location of new foreign subsidiaries. In fact, the impact of...

This paper examines empirically how international taxation affects the volume and pricing of cross-border banking activities for a sample of banks in 38 countries over the 1998-2008 - period. Home country corporate income taxation of foreign-source bank income is found to reduce banking-sector...

On May 9, 2010 euro zone countries announced the creation of the European Financial Stability Facility as a response to the sovereign debt crisis. This paper investigates the impact of this announcement on bank share prices, bank CDS spreads and sovereign CDS spreads. The main private...

This paper finds that lending by state banks is less procyclical than lending by private banks, especially in countries with good governance. Lending by state banks in high income countries is even countercyclical. On the liability side, state banks expand potentially unstable non-deposit...

This paper finds that shareholder-friendly corporate governance is positively associated with bank insolvency risk, as proxied by the Z-score and the Merton’s distance to default measure, for an international sample of banks over the 2004-2008 period. Banks are special in that ‘good’...