This short article studies the tax effects on a start-up investment decision under uncertainty. Since the representative firm can decide both when to invest and how much to borrow, the distortive effects are twofold. We thus show that the deadweight loss (namely, the ratio between the welfare...

In this article we use a stochastic model with one representative firm to study business tax policy under default risk. We will show that, for a given tax rate, the government has an incentive to reduce (increase) financial instability and default costs if its objective function is welfare (tax...

Much of the literature on the economics of mortgage markets has studied the FRM-ARM choice made by individual borrowers. However, to decide if the outcome of such a choice is efficient or approximately so, it is necessary to explore the question of optimal risk-sharing in mortgage contracts. But...

This paper estimates a reduced-form model to assess the credit risk of General Insurance (GI) non-life firms in the UK. Compared to earlier studies, it uses a much larger sample including 30 years of data for 515 firms, and also considers a much wider set of possible determinants of credit risk....

In this article we focus on a representative firm that can decide when to invest under default risk. On the one hand, this firm can benefit from generous tax depreciation allowances, on the other hand it faces a default risk. Our aim is to study the effects of tax depreciation allowances in a...

This paper explores an overlooked phenomenon in mortgage markets: repayment of underwater mortgages. Since repayment in this case requires the borrower to use out-of-pocket funds along with the proceeds from the house sale to settle the loan, it may appear unattractive and even irrational. But...

The potential for portfolio diversification is driven broadly by two characteristics: the degree to which systematic risk factors are correlated with each other and the degree of dependence individual firms have to the different types of risk factors. Using a global vector autoregressive...

This paper considers a simple model of credit risk and derives the limit distribution of losses under different assumptions regarding the structure of systematic and idiosyncratic risks and the nature of firm heterogeneity. The theoretical results obtained indicate that if firm-specific risk...