Thin capitalization rules have become an important element in the corporate tax systems of developed countries. This paper sets up a model where national and multinational firms choose tax-efficient financial structures and countries compete for multinational firms through statutory tax rates...

The introduction of the 2006 Norwegian shareholder income tax was announced in advance, and it increased top marginal tax rates on individual dividend income from zero to 28 percent. We document strong timing effects on dividend payout on a large panel of non-listed corporations, with a surge of...

Theory recommends aligning the tax treatment of debt and equity. A few countries, notably Belgium, have introduced an allowance for corporate equity (ACE) to achieve tax neutrality. We study the effects of adopting an ACE on debt financing, passive investment, and active investment of...

Existing theories of a firm’s optimal capital structure seem to fail in explaining why many healthy and profitable firms rely heavily on equity financing, even though benefits associated with debt (like tax shields) appear to be high and the bankruptcy risk low. This holds in particular for...

Using Dutch data we empirically investigate how financing and innovation vary across firm characteristics. We find that when firms face financial constraints, debt financing and innovation choices are not independent of firm characteristics, and R&D slows down. In the absence of financial...

We analyze the effect of investor level taxes, firm-specific ownership structure and firm-specific payout policy on firms' capital structure choice. Our analysis is based on data for 10,983 firms from 13 Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries over the time period 2002-2012. Our results...

The tax bias in favour of debt finance under the corporate income tax means that corporate debt ratios exceed the socially optimal level. This creates a rationale for thin-capitalization rules limiting the amount of debt that qualifies for interest deductibility. This paper sets up a model of...

Diversified firms often trade at a discount with respect to their focused counterparts. The literature has tried to explain the apparent misallocation of resources with lobbying activities or power struggles. We show that diversification can destroy value even when resources are efficiently...

This paper studies how variations in tax rates and profitability affect the (unconditional) quantiles of the distribution of the leverage of European foreign owned subsidiaries in the presence of unobserved company characteristics, possibly correlated with their observable dimensions. To achieve...

This paper shows that the cost of enforcing contracts governing non-financial relationships between firms affects a firm's financing structure. We analyze the interaction between a firm's capital structure and the type of contracts it uses to deal with its suppliers. We first develop a...