This paper investigates whether investor-level taxes affect corporate payout policy decisions. We predict and find a surge of special dividends in the final months of 2010 and 2012, immediately before individual-level dividend tax rates were expected to increase. We also find evidence that...

The dominant conception of the corporation today is that firms exist to maximize value for shareholders. Unfortunately, a narrow understanding of this paradigm causes many business leaders to believe that they are legally and morally obligated to maximize stock price for their investors. This...

We contribute to the empirical literature on the relationship between corporate taxes and investment. We exploit the introduction of the so-called ACE corporate tax reform in Belgium that came into effect in January 2006 to evaluate this relationship in a quasi-experimental setting based on...

We examine how firms respond to uncertainty around U.S. tax policy changes, namely the individual level tax rate increases set to take effect on January 1, 2011 and January 1, 2013. We provide evidence that firms time the uncertainty in the tax environment and revise their dividend policy to an...

We introduce a model of the banking sector that formally incorporate a buffer function of capital. Heterogeneous banks choose their portfolio risk, bank size, and capital holdings. Banks voluntarily hold equity when the buffer effect against the risk of default outweighs the cost advantages of...

This paper provides an analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on SMEs and entrepreneurs, and the SME and entrepreneurship policy measures implemented during the course of a year since the start of the pandemic. The paper formulates 15 lessons learned for policy going forward, to assist...

French Abstract: Nous étudions l’impact de la crise sanitaire sur l’activité de plus de 645 000 entreprises, à partir de données individuelles permettant d’estimer leur chiffre d’affaires à une fréquence mensuelle. Notre approche, fondée sur un modèle de micro-simulation, est...

Using the 2008 corporate tax reform in China as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that compared to unaffected firms, firms facing tax increases report significantly lower profit margins to avoid paying more taxes, while there is no significant difference for firms facing a tax cut. Our results...

Family firms are often considered characteristically different from non-family firms. However, our understanding of family firms suffers from an inability to identify them in total population data; information is rarely available regarding owners, their kinship and their involvement in firm...