Tax Policy and Firms' Financial Choices: Empirical Evidence from the Dominican Republic

This study aims at investigating the effects of tax policy on the capital structure of companies in an emerging economy, such as that of the Dominican Republic, using data from the tax returns of each individual company. Indeed, despite the vast and rich literature investigating the financial behaviour of firms, only in the last decade the attention has also been focused on emerging economies. In this prospective, a fixed-effects (FE) estimation technique has been employed based on financial and economic indicators opportunely extracted by a data-set provided by the Ministry of Finance to the World Bank as part of a collaboration on the evaluation of the fiscal policy. The use of direct information on corporate tax returns, confidential data hardly made public or provided to scholars, allows to add a further contribution to the literature debate on the relationship between taxation and the financial behaviour of firms. The results of the analysis are in line with the research hypothesis showing how the individual determinants significantly explain the capital structure of companies.