Tax competition for the mobile factor capital has led to a trend in many countries to levy lower taxes on interest income, often introducing differential taxation between interest and business income. In this study, we analyze the effect of such differential taxation on the debt ratio of firms....

Thirty years after the seminal work of Modigliani and Miller and countless articles the capital structure puzzle is for the most part unsolved. Especially, in this field of research there is a considerable lack of empirical evidence. Using firm level data from seven European countries, this...

In the light of the recent financial crisis, the discussion on the nature of runs and on the stabilizing role of liquidity holdings has intensified. This paper explores the cash management conducted by German open-end equity funds for the period between 2005 and 2010. Since ownership structures...

House-purchasing decisions and the possibility of existing homeowners to tap into their housing equity depend decisively on prevailing loan-to-value (LTV) ratios in mortgage markets with borrowing constrained households. Utilizing a smooth transition local projection (STLP) approach, I show that...

I quantify the importance of financial structure, labor market rigidities and industry mix for cross-country asymmetries in monetary transmission. To do so, I determine how closely the impulse responses to a monetary policy shock obtained from country-specific vectorautoregressive (VAR) models...