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...

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...

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...

Peer-to-business lending refers to online platforms facilitating loans from individuals to smalland medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We conjecture that easy-to-understand risk ratings conveyed by the platform play a pronounced role in influencing the borrowing success of SMEs and that more...

We show that U.S. dollar movements affect syndicated loan terms for U.S. borrowers, even for those without trade exposure. We identify the effect of dollar movements using spread and loan amount adjustments during the syndication process. Using this high-frequency, within loan variation, we find...

The effects of corporate taxation on firm behavior have been extensively discussed in the neoclassical model of firm behavior which abstracts from agency problems. As emphasized by the corporate governance literature, corporate investment behavior is however crucially influenced by diverging...

In this paper, I use difference-in-differences regressions to measure how the debt tax shield affects the capital structure of a company. By comparing the financial leverage of treatment and control companies before and after the introduction of an equity tax shield, I infer the impact of the...

Insufficient capital buffers of banks have been identified as one main cause for the large systemic effects of the recent financial crisis. Although higher capital is no panacea, it yet features prominently in proposals for regulatory reform. But how do increased capital requirements affect...

This article describes the new ACE-type system implemented in Italy since 2012. We have first shown that this system reduces but does not eliminate the financial distortion due to interest deductibility. Using a dataset of Italian companies, we analyzed the impact of this relief on Italian firm...

Do macroprudential regulations on residential lending influence commercial lending behavior too? To answer this question, we identify the compositional changes in banks' supply of credit using the variation in their holdings of residential mortgages on which extra capital requirements were...