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...

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 analyze a relational contracting problem, in which the principal has private information about the future value of the relationship. In order to reduce bonus payments, the principal is tempted to claim that the value of the future relationship is lower than it actually is. To induce...

This paper explores the optimal provision of dynamic incentives for employees with reciprocal preferences. Building on the presumption that a relational contract can establish a norm of reciprocity, I show that generous upfront wages that activate an employee’s reciprocal preferences are more...

Mutual fund risk-taking via active portfolio rebalancing varies both in the cross-section and over time. In this paper, I show that the same is true for funds' off- balance sheet risk-taking, even after controlling for on-balance sheet activities. For this purpose, I propose a novel measure of...

Thirty years after the seminal work of Modigliani and Miller and countless articles the capital structure puzzle is for the most part unsolved. Especially, in this field of research there is a considerable lack of empirical evidence. Using firm level data from seven European countries, this...

We investigate how intangible capital in form of intellectual property, such as patents, might mitigate financing constraints. While scholars have already argued that patents might have a signalling value reducing information asymmetries between borrowers and lenders, we quantify the value of...