Costs of debt, tax benefits and a new measure of non-debt tax shields: examining debt conservatism in Spanish listed firms

Estimating the Tax Benefits of Debt

n 1958, Nobel Laureates Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller published their famous irrelevance theorems.1 One implication from these theorems is that ers and the U.S. government. Panel A of Figure 1 shows that if the corporate tax rate is 33.3%, the government gets one-third of the pie for an all-equity firm, and stockholders get the remaining two-thirds. But if the firm chooses to finance with...

Valuing the Debt Tax Shield

How Big Are the Tax Benefits of Debt?

I integrate under firm-specific benefit functions to estimate that the capitalized tax benefit of debt equals 9.7 percent of firm value (or as low as 4.3 percent, net of personal taxes). The typical firm could double tax benefits by issuing debt until the marginal tax benefit begins to decline. I infer how aggressively a firm uses debt by observing the shape of its tax benefit function. Paradox...

A Martingale Approach to Compute the Value of Debt Tax Shields

The recent interest in the valuation of tax benefits from debt arises from the disagreement in the existing literature about the meaning of “value of tax shields.” Although it is accepted that the value of a firm increases as effect of the tax deductibility of interest, the correct valuation of this extra-value is controversial. In this paper we adopt a risk-neutral approach to derive a general...

Taxation and Corporate Use of Debt: Implications for Tax Policy

There is growing empirical evidence showing that taxes encourage use of debt in large profi table fi rms and discourage it in less profi table fi rms. There has been debate, though, on the source of any non-tax costs from debt fi nance offsetting the tax advantages of debt. This paper lays out competing hypotheses, notes that the existing empirical evidence is more supportive of a “lemons” mode...