Becker and Fuest (forthcoming) provides a new explanation for the important and puzzling link between limited liability and corporate taxation. The authors argue that a corporate tax on all entrepreneurs with limited liability is optimal when entrepreneurs can offset potential losses and when...

Becker and Fuest (forthcoming) provides a new explanation for the important and puzzling link between limited liability and corporate taxation. The authors argue that a corporate tax on all entrepreneurs with limited liability is optimal when entrepreneurs can offset potential losses and when...

I present a rationale for a government to discriminate between debt and equity financing when taxing corporate income. For risk-averse entrepreneurs, equity generates more surplus than debt, because it provides financing and insurance. A government seeking to extract surplus from entrepreneurs...

We study how adverse selection distorts equilibrium investment allocations in a Walrasian credit market with two-sided heterogeneity. Representative investor and partial equilibrium economies are special cases where investment allocations are distorted above perfect information allocations. By...

It is well-known that cash-flow business taxes with full loss-offset, and their present-value equivalents, are neutral with respect to firms' investment decisions when firms are riskneutral and there are no distortions. We study the effects of cash-flow business taxation when there is bankruptcy...

The expected cost of capital is a crucial component for most of the topics in corporate finance. Unfortunately in the presence of risky debt, it is systematically overestimated. This bias is increasing in leverage and the volatility of cash flows. We show the existence of the bias and assess its...

This paper studies a firmś optimal capital structure in an environment, where the firmś stock price serves as a public signal for its credit worthiness. In equilibrium, equity investors choose how much information to acquire privately, which induces a positive relation between the amount of...

Based on a dataset including 11,636 private debt placements issued globally between 1999 and 2016, we investigate the association between borrower-lender information asymmetry and the cost of debt for issuers. We observe that information asymmetry due to being a private or unrated firm is...

Bowen, Chen and Cheng (2008) document a negative association between analyst following and the discount at issuance of seasoned equity offerings which, they argue, provides evidence of a direct link between analyst following, information asymmetry and cost of capital. While the empirical setting...

We study the relation between institutional shareholdings, private information in stock prices and the cost of capital. Using the probability of informed trading as a proxy for private information, we find that institutional ownership reduces private information in stock prices, and firms with...