Tax debt spiral

Valuing the Debt Tax Shield

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...

Lotteries: Skewness and the Tax Preference for Corporate Debt

The tax preference for interest payments by corporations as compared to dividend payments is a long surviving feature of many tax systems. Many have argued that there is no reason for this preference and so it distorts the capital structure of corporations needlessly. This article argues that because the returns to equity are more positively skewed as compared to debt, individual investors will...

The Tax Smoothing Impli ations of the Federal Debt Paydown

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...