Existing theories of a firm's optimal capital structure seem to fail in explaining why many healthy and profitable firms rely heavily on equity financing, even though benefits associated with debt (like tax shields) appear to be high and the bankruptcy risk low. This holds in particular for...

The corporate finance literature documents that managers tend to over-invest in their companies. A number of theoretical contributions have aimed at explaining this stylized fact, most of them focusing on a fundamental agency problem between shareholders and managers. The present paper shows...

Tax competition for the mobile factor capital has led to a trend in many countries to levy lower taxes on interest income, often introducing differential taxation between interest and business income. In this study, we analyze the effect of such differential taxation on the debt ratio of firms....

This paper provides new evidence that taxes affect capital structure choice, using a unique and comprehensive panel data set which covers 86,173 German non-financial firms over the years 1973–2008. Following the Graham methodology to simulate marginal tax rates, we find a statistically and...

We show that credit supply shocks have a strong impact on firm-level as well as aggregate investment by applying the methodology developed by Amiti and Weinstein (2013) to a rich dataset of matched bank-firm loans in the Portuguese economy for the period 2005 to 2013. We argue that their...

"This paper investigates the capital structure choices that firms make in their initial year of operation, using restricted-access data from the Kauffman Firm Survey. Contrary to many accounts of startup activity, the firms in our data rely heavily on external debt sources such as bank...

Using a Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) identified with a mix of sign and zero restrictions, we show that a restrictive bank loan supply shock has a strong and persistent negative impact on real GDP and the GDP deflator. This result comes about even though flows of other sources of...