The corporate finance literature documents that managers tend to overinvest into physical assets. A number of theoretical contributions have aimed to explain this stylized fact, most of them focussing on a fundamental agency problem between shareholders and managers. The present paper shows that...

This paper provides a model-based analysis of special tax rules for corporations that invest in stocks of other corporations. To avoid double taxation the returns from such stock investments (dividends and capital gains) are usually tax-exempted or taxed at a reduced tax rate. This allows for...

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...