IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/btx/wpaper/1507.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Corporate tax incentives and capital structure: empirical evidence from UK tax returns

Author

Listed:
  • Michael P Devereux

    (Centre for Business Taxation, University of Oxford)

  • Giorgia Maffini

    (Centre for Business Taxation, University of Oxford)

  • Jing Xing

    (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)

Abstract

This paper examines how companies' capital structure is affected by the corporate income tax system. Our analysis employs confidential company-level corporation tax return data in the UK. Our main identification strategy is based on variation in companies¡¯ marginal tax rates due to the existence of kinks in the corporate tax rate schedule. Using a dynamic adjustment model of capital structure, we find a positive and substantial long-run tax effect on companies' financial leverage. We show that there are considerable discrepancies between estimates of taxable profits reported in tax return data and in financial statements and that the estimated tax effect on capital structure using financial statements is likely to be biased downward. We find that companies adjust their capital structures gradually in response to changes in the marginal tax rate. Moreover, we find that the external leverage of domestic stand-alone companies and of multinational companies responds strongly to corporate tax incentives.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael P Devereux & Giorgia Maffini & Jing Xing, 2015. "Corporate tax incentives and capital structure: empirical evidence from UK tax returns," Working Papers 1507, Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation.
  • Handle: RePEc:btx:wpaper:1507
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Business_Taxation/Docs/Publications/Working_Papers/Series_15/WP1507.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fischer, Marcel & Jensen, Bjarne Astrup, 2019. "The debt tax shield in general equilibrium," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 100(C), pages 151-166.
    2. Fischer, Marcel & Jensen, Bjarne Astrup, 2017. "The debt tax shield, economic growth and inequality," arqus Discussion Papers in Quantitative Tax Research 219, arqus - Arbeitskreis Quantitative Steuerlehre.
    3. Peter Vaz da Fonseca & Michele Nascimento Juca & Wilson Toshiro Nakamura, 2020. "Debt Tax Benefits in a High Tax Emerging Market: Evidence from Brazil," International Journal of Economics & Business Administration (IJEBA), International Journal of Economics & Business Administration (IJEBA), vol. 0(2), pages 35-52.
    4. Giorgia Maffini & Jing Xing & Michael P Devereux, 2016. "The impact of investment incentives: evidence from UK corporation tax returns," Working Papers 1601, Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Corporate taxation; capital structure; tax returns;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G3 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance
    • H2 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:btx:wpaper:1507. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Dongxian Guo (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sbsoxuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.