This paper empirically analyses whether both personal and corporate taxation have an impact on companies' capital structure decisions. We investigate the effect of the difference in taxation of debt and equity financing on capital structures. Our empirical results, based on a comprehensive panel...

This paper analyses technical efficiency of European banks over the period 1996-2003 with unbalanced panel data techniques. A latent class frontier model is used which allows the identification of different segments in the production frontier. We find that there are three statistically...

This paper presents a micro data approach to the identification of credit crunches. Using a survey among German firms which regularly queries the firms' assessment of the current willingness of banks to extend credit we estimate the probability of a restrictive credit supply policy by time...

This paper documents that standard cross-sectional determinants of firm leverage also apply to the capital structure of large banks in the United States and Europe. We find a remarkable consistency in sign, significance and economic magnitude. Like non-financial firms, banks appear to have...

This paper analyzes banks' choice between lending to firms individually and sharing lending with other banks, when firms and banks are subject to moral hazard and monitoring is essential. Multiple-bank lending is optimal whenever the benefit of greater diversification in terms of higher...

In this paper we challenge the view that corporate bonds are always arm's length debt. We analyze the effect of bond ratings on the stock price return to acquirers in M&A transactions, which tend to have significant effects on creditor wealth. We find acquirers abnormal returns to be higher if...

We assess the sustainability of public finances in the EU15 using stationarity and cointegration analysis. Specifically, we use panel unit root tests of the first and second generation allowing in some cases for structural breaks. We also apply modern panel cointegration techniques developed by...

We use a 3-step analysis to assess the sustainability of public finances in the EU27. Firstly, we perform the SURADF specific panel unit root test to investigate the mean-reverting behaviour of general government expenditures and revenues ratios. Secondly, we apply the bootstrap panel...

We assess the cointegration relationship between current account and budget balances, and effective real exchange rates, using recent bootstrap panel cointegration techniques and SUR methods. We investigate the magnitude of the relationship between the two imbalances for each country for the...

We investigate the existence of Granger-causality between current account and government budget balances over the period 1970-2007, for different EU and OECD country groupings. We use the panel-data approach of Kónya (2006), which is based on SUR systems and Wald tests with country specific...