Stress tests with handpicked scenarios might misrepresent risks either because dangerous scenarios are not considered or because the scenarios considered are too implausible. To overcome these two pitfalls we propose a systematic search for the worst case within a relative entropy ball of...

Studies such as Lemmon, Roberts and Zender (2008) demonstrate how stable firms’capital structures are over time, and raise the question of whether new theories of capital structure are needed to explain these phenomena. In this paper, I show that trade-off theory-based empirical proxies that...

This paper provides explicit expression for the lower bound and the upper bound of the overall VaR of a portfolio of business units when the joint risks factors of each business unit follows a mixture of multivariate elliptic distributions with dynamic conditional correlation matrix. We use...

Stress tests with handpicked scenarios might misrepresent risks either because the scenarios considered are too implausible or because some dangerous scenarios are not considered. Systematic search for the worst case within some set of plausible scenarios is introduced to overcome these two...

We analyze how interactions between corporate taxation and corporate governance affect shareholder capital. Using a model with strategic interaction between managers and outside shareholders, we hypothesize that, while an increase in the corporate tax rate decreases shareholder capital, an...

This study provides evidence that Belgian firms affiliated to a business group (holding) manage their earnings more than stand-alone firms. Earnings management is especially more prevalent in fully owned group firms compared to group firms with minority shareholders. This evidence is consistent...

In choosing transparency, firms must trade off the benefits from better access to finance against the cost of a greater tax burden. We study this trade-off in a model with distortionary taxes and endogenous rationing of external finance. The evidence from two different data sets, one formed only...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of limitations of the tax deductibility of interest expenses for multinational corporations, so-called thin-capitalization rules. The empirical investigation exploits a large micro-level panel dataset of multinational firms to analyze the effects of...

In this study we investigate the impact of the thin capitalization rule (TCR), introduced in Germany in 2008, on firms' capital structure, investment and profitability. The identification of the causal effects is based on the escape clauses in the regulation using a difference-in-difference...

We provide a theoretical and empirical study of the relation between financial development and the size of the underground economy. In our theoretical framework agents allocate investment between a low-return technology which can be operated with internal funds, and a high-return technology...