This paper highlights the role of the domestic tax system in determining the economic consequences of an external debt overhang. The analysis indicates that fairly strong, and probably unrealistic, assumptions about the domestic tax system are needed to argue that the investment disincentives associated with the debt overhang are large enough to place a country on the wrong side of the debt Laf...

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...

A tax-smoothing objective is used to assess the optimal composition of public debt with respect to maturity and contingencies. This objective motivates the government to make its debt payouts contingent on the levels of public outlay and the tax base. If these contingencies are present, but asset prices of non-contingent indexed debt are stochastic, then full tax smoothing dictates an optimal m...

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the current sovereign debt crisis in Europe have focused attention on the macroeconomic consequences of debt financing. In this paper, we turn our attention to the use of debt finance in the corporate sector and study the generalequilibrium effects of debt finance on investment and growth. More precisely, we analyze underinvestment in equilibrium when marke...

This paper investigates the determinants of capital structure of financial service firms in China. Using a relative regression of accounting data for 36 A-share financial listed companies over the years 2005-2009, an empirical study on determinants of capital structure in financial industry is conducted. The results show that profitability, firm size, non-debt tax shields, earnings volatility a...

We examine the joint optimization of financial leverage and irreversible capacity investment in a real options framework with risky debt and endogenous interest costs. Higher capacity, ceteris paribus, increases operating leverage and default probability, but lowers ex post adjustment costs and generates larger tax shields. A key insight is that financial leverage and capacity are substitutes i...

Debt and currency crises are closely interlinked through the government’s intertemporal budget constraint. The default tax and the inflation/devaluation tax can be considered as alternative means of financing. Our empirical analysis finds that high-debt countries choose default rather than inflation/devaluation for financing, while a high money stock reduces the probability of debt crises. Furt...

In this paper, we analyze the optimal default strategy of a firm when debt is convertible into equity. For this purpose, we consider a convertible consol bond in a time-independent model in the presence of bankruptcy costs and tax deductability. The optimal default and conversion strategy result from a game between equity and debt holders. We show that an optimal default of convertible debt occ...