We contribute to the empirical literature on the debt bias of corporate income taxation through a micro …-econometric evaluation of the so-called ACE corporate tax reform in Belgium based on firm-level accounting data. We interpret the tax reform … that came into effect in January 2006 as an economic quasi experiment. We identify its causal impact on the leverage ratio …

We develop a model of the joint capital structure decisions of banks and their borrowers. Strikingly high bank leverage … take on high leverage safely; supply chain effects compel them to do so. Firms with low leverage also arise naturally, as … framework underlie our model, we can quantify the impact capital regulation and other government interventions have on leverage …

issuer firms expand their total assets and fixed assets, and also raise their leverage …

their leverage …

-post performance, we find that issuer firms expand their total assets and fixed assets, and also raise their leverage. …

The literature on market timing of long-term debt issuance yields mixed evidence that managers can successfully time … their debt-maturity issuance. The early results that are indicative of debt-maturity timing are not robust to accounting for … structural breaks or to other measures of debt maturity from firm-level data that account for call and put provisions in debt …