The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) recently proposed an interest barrier to fight tax base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS). We use the introduction of such an interest deductibility restriction in Germany as a quasi-experiment and find significant corporate...

The theoretical literature suggests that when taking tax effects into account, debt ought to be preferable to equity. However, there are no uniform predictions of the size of this tax benefit (tax shield) in comparison to an opposing increasing cost of debt (especially insolvency costs). The...