This paper analyzes how multinational enterprises respond to a restriction on interest deductions incurred for internal borrowing. The emphasis of the study is on a firm's response with respect to external borrowing. The empirical investigation applies propensity score matching techniques and...

This paper examines how taxes affect bilateral internal debt financing among foreign entities of multinational firms. Our data allows us to construct precise bilateral tax-rate differentials between borrowers and lenders of internal debt, which are found to be positively related to internal debt...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of limitations of the tax deductibility of interest expenses for multinational corporations, so-called thin-capitalization rules. The empirical investigation exploits a large micro-level panel dataset of multinational firms to analyze the effects of...

This paper shows that the cost of enforcing contracts governing non-financial relationships between firms affects a firm's financing structure. We analyze the interaction between a firm's capital structure and the type of contracts it uses to deal with its suppliers. We first develop a...

Some multinationals use the parent company as a lender to the group, whereas others set up an internal bank in a low tax jurisdiction. This paper discusses the link between capital structure choices and tax planning motives in multinational groups. We model the trade-off between the use of...

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...

This article investigates tax-planning behaviour by means of inter-company finance and the effectiveness of government countermeasures via thin-capitalization rules. A simple theoretical model which considers the financing decision of a multinational company is used to obtain empirical...