Recent regulatory efforts aim at lowering the cyclicality of bank lending because of its potential detrimental effects on financial stability and the real economy. We investigate the cyclicality of SME lending by local banks with vs. without a public mandate, controlling for location, size, loan...

By combining the approaches of Gertler and Karadi (2011) and Bernanke et al. (1999), I develop a DSGE model with leverage constraints both in the banking and in the non-financial firm sector. I calibrate this "full model" to US data. In a world with only a monetary policy and a productivity...

Using a unique and comprehensive data set on the two largest economies of the Eurozone - France and Germany - this paper first proceeds to a computation of the Gordy formula relaxing the ad hoc sizedependent constraints of the Basel formulas. Our study contributes to Article 501 of the Capital...

This paper provides new evidence that taxes affect capital structure choice, using a unique and comprehensive panel data set which covers 86,173 German non-financial firms over the years 1973–2008. Following the Graham methodology to simulate marginal tax rates, we find a statistically and...

Industrialization and the rise of nationalism were the two major developments in Germany before the World War I. A novel county-level dataset reveals that industrialization and nationalism measured by membership in the "Kriegervereine'", the biggest civil organization at the time, were...

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 over-invest in their companies. A number of theoretical contributions have aimed at explaining this stylized fact, most of them focusing on a fundamental agency problem between shareholders and managers. The present paper shows...