Taxing capital gains is an important obstacle to the efficient allocation of resources because it imposes a transaction cost on the vendor which locks in appreciated assets by raising the vendor's reservation price in prospective transactions. For M&As, this effect has been intensively studied...

Taxing capital gains is an important obstacle to the efficient allocation of resources because it imposes a transaction cost on the vendor which locks in appreciated assets by raising the vendor’s reservation price in prospective transactions. For M&As, this effect has been intensively studied...

While tax havens are known as custodians and intermediaries of assets, this is the first paper to document that havens affect the ownership of assets on a large scale. We investigate cross-border, tax-haven mergers and acquisitions (M&A) using hand-collected data on tax residence laws and a...

The tax laws of most developed countries are debt biased since firms can deduct interest on debt but not on equity. This bias is known to distort investment decisions. However, less is known about how the debt tax shield affects the ownership of assets when bidders differ financial expertise and...

Using a comprehensive sample of M&A deals around the world, we analyze the effect of corporate capital gains taxation on M&As involving corporate sellers (e.g. subsidiary sales). Capital gains taxation distorts the market for corporate control by imposing a cost on corporate sellers which leads...

Taxing capital gains is an important obstacle to the efficient allocation of resources because it imposes a transaction cost on the vendor which locks in appreciated assets by raising the vendor's reservation price in prospective transactions. For M&As, this effect has been intensively studied...

This study uses corporate tax return data to examine the evolution of firms' financial structure and performance after leveraged buyouts (LBOs) for a comprehensive sample of 317 LBOs taking place between 1995 and 2007. We find little evidence of operating improvements subsequent to an LBO,...

This paper uses corporate tax return data to study private equity (PE) buyouts of private U.S. firms. PE firms disproportionately target two types of private companies – those with poor operating performance and those that have growth potential but are dependent on external financing and...

We test the hypothesis that foreign direct investment promotes corporate governance spillovers in the host country. Using firm-level data from 64 countries during the period 2005-2014, we find that cross-border M&A activity is associated with subsequent improvements in the governance of...

We show that it is a signal of deal quality in cross-border M&A if acquirers have private equity firms as owners (‘PE backing'). As such, announcements of cross-border M&A deals by PE-backed acquirers are associated with positive stock price reactions, but only if targets are in poor...