Article history: Received 25 April 2012 Received in revised form 29 August 2013 Accepted 5 September 2013 Available online 13 September 2013 This paper examines the relation between business group affiliation and the cost of debt capital. The co-insurance effect associated with business groups can reduce the cost of debt, while expropriation by controlling shareholders can raise the cost of deb...

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...

This paper presents and analyzes an endogenous growth model with public capital and public debt. It is assumed that the ratio of the primary surplus to gross domestic income is a positive linear function of the debt income ratio which assures that public debt is sustainable. The paper then derives necessary conditions for the existence of a sustainable balanced growth path for the analytical mo...

Benhabib and Rustichini [Optimal taxes without commitment, J. Econ. Theory 77 (1997) 231–259] study the properties of optimal capital taxes in economies without commitment and no government debt. They find that capital taxes may be different from zero at steady state. This note shows that, once governments have the possibility of issuing debt and smoothing taxes over time, optimal steady state ...

I examine the role of debt-financed special payments to shareholders in defending incumbent managements during proxy contests. This role is based on shareholder preference for dividends and the consequent linkage between dividends and managerial security. The model is used to explain why the seemingly contradictory phenomena of (i) wealth losses to shareholders and (ii) lack of any substantial ...

This paper adopts a contingent-claim valuation framework to investigate the role of subordinated debt in alleviating the moral hazard problem in banking and providing the regulator with the information on the risk of bank assets. The incorporation of bankruptcy cost in the framework of the analysis provides some new evidence about the potential role of subordinated debt. The extent of market di...

This paper tries to explain the declining level of public investment in OECD countries. The theoretical framework hints to the relevance of a number of demand and supply factors – ranging from the yield of public investment to institutions like the EU deficit limits. The econometric results indicate that the decline is largely due to two developments: First to the pile-up of public debt since t...

Using data from publicly traded South Korean corporations for the period 1980-94, this paper finds evidence that increases in financial liberalization that accompanied the more general process of financial globalization have significantly reduced the maturity structure of corporate debt contracts, thus lending partial empirical support to the idea that financial liberalization can be well descr...

This paper tries to explain the declining level of public investment in OECD countries by taking account of political and economic driving forces. The theoretical framework hints to the relevance of a number of demand and supply factors – ranging from the yield of public investment to institutions like the EU deficit limits of the Stability and Growth Pact. The econometric results indicate that...

We investigate the relationship between household debt and health outcomes for OECD countries over the period 1995 to 2012. Using a dataset of aggregated, standardized and objective measures of household debt and health outcomes, we estimate an instrumental variable (GMM) model in order to deal with endogeneity and reverse causality concerns between health and debt. We find that higher househol...