The U.S. is beset by weak economic growth, ballooning debt and stubbornly high unemployment but the collapse of the housing bubble that spurred the 2008-2009 global financial crisis was more a consequence than a cause of what is wrong. The real culprit was and remains poor policymaking in the...

In both Europe and the United States, there has been much recent debate regarding whether, in response to the 2008 financial crisis, one should enact a financial transactions tax (FTT) or a financial activities tax (FAT) – commonly viewed as mutually exclusive alternatives. This article...

This Comment evaluates four recent proposals to reform tax laws affecting the financial industry. After introducing the proposals, the author provides a theoretical framework for evaluating them and then relies on this framework to explore the benefits and drawbacks of each. Ultimately, the...

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 compares dynamic relationship between economic growth and corporate tax rate during the recent financial crisis and the non-crisis period using a panel VAR for 29 OECD countries over the period 1998-2016. The results show that corporate tax rate has a significantly negative effect on...

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...

The main purpose of this study is to investigate whether there is a relationship between bank efficiency and stock performance in the EU markets using 141 commercial banks over the period 2004-2010. First, we estimate cost and profit efficiencies of banking sectors in the 27 European Union...

How can law best mitigate harm from crises like storms, epidemics, and financial meltdowns? This Article uses the law and economics framework of property rules and liability rules to analyze crisis responses across multiple areas of law, focusing particularly on the ways the Internal Revenue...

Questions have been raised regarding the role of low-tax offshore jurisdictions in the global financial crisis, based largely on evidence that many problematic asset-backed securities were issued from or listed in the Cayman Islands, Jersey, Ireland, and other ‘offshore' sites. However, there...

On September 3-4, 2009 SUERF and Utrecht University School of Economicsorganized the Colloquium "The Quest for Stability" in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium.