That most corporate tax systems favor debt over equity finance is now widely recognized as, potentially, amplifying risks to financial stability. This paper makes a first attempt to explore, empirically, the link between this tax bias and the probability of financial crisis. It finds that...

This paper explores whether corporate tax bias toward debt finance differs between banks and nonbanks,using a large panel of micro data. On average, it finds that there is no significant difference. The marginal tax effect for both banks and non-banks is close to 0.2. However, the responsiveness...

Understanding the impact of the asymmetric tax treatment of debt and equity on the capital structures of financial institutions is critical to shaping and assessing responses to the problem of excessive leverage that underlay the 2009 financial crisis - but there is no empirical evidence to draw...