Understanding the effectiveness of social distancing on the spread of COVID-19 is crucial to justify economically costly social distancing measures. We present a case study focusing on the three Scandinavian countries. Whereas Denmark and Norway imposed relatively strict measures, Sweden follows...

There is ample evidence that internal capital markets incur efficiency costs for multinational enterprises (MNEs). This paper analyzes whether tax avoidance behavior interacts with the costs of running an internal capital market and how policies of competing governments respond to it. We show...

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...

The corporate finance literature documents that managers tend to overinvest into physical assets. A number of theoretical contributions have aimed to explain this stylized fact, most of them focussing on a fundamental agency problem between shareholders and managers. The present paper shows that...

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 offers a new explanation for the prevalent use of convertible securities in venture capital finance. Convertible securities can be used to endogenously allocate cash flow rights as a function of the realized quality of the project. This property can be used to mitigate the double...

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...

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...

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are important for employment and economic activity; however, they are perceived to lack adequate financing, which hampers their growth. As a consequence, governments have implemented a number of programs to foster SME lending and attention has focused on...