The paper shows how-in a Merton-type model with bankruptcy-the currency composition of debt changes the risk profile of a company raising a given amount of financing, and thus affects the cost of debt. Foreign currency borrowing is cheaper when the exchange rate is positively correlated with the...

We examine how the cost of corporate credit varies around fiscal consolidations aimed at reducing government debt. Using a new dataset on fiscal consolidations and syndicated corporate loan data, we find that loan spreads increase with fiscal consolidations, especially for small firms, domestic...

The paper provides estimates of the long-run, tax-adjusted, user cost elasticity of capital (UCE) in a small open economy, exploiting three sources of variation in Canadian tax policy: across provinces, industries, and years. Estimates of the UCE with Canadian data are less prone to the...

Existing studies on the downward trend in the labor share of income mostly focus on changes within individual countries. I document, however, that half of the global decline in the labor share of income can be traced to the relocation of activities between countries. I develop a two-country...

This paper explores the effects of fiscal transparency on the borrowing costs of 33 emerging and developing economies (EMs), and on foreign demand for their sovereign debt. Using multiple indicators, including a constructed one based on the published data in the IMF's Government Finance...

The recovery of private investment in Italy has lagged its euro area peers over the past decade. This paper examines the role of elevated labor costs in hindering the recovery. Specifically, labor costs rose faster than labor productivity prior to the global financial crisis and have remained...

Using a sample of publicly listed banks from 62 countries over the 1991-2017 period, we investigate the impact of capital on banks' cost of equity. Consistent with the theoretical prediction that more equity in the capital mix leads to a fall in firms' costs of equity, we find that better...