IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jfinec/v98y2010i2p195-213.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Have the tax benefits of debt been overestimated?

Author

Listed:
  • Blouin, Jennifer
  • Core, John E.
  • Guay, Wayne

Abstract

We re-examine the claim that many corporations are underleveraged in that they fail to take full advantage of debt tax shields. We show prior results suggesting underleverage stems from biased estimates of tax benefits from interest deductions. We develop improved estimates of marginal tax rates using a non-parametric procedure that produces more accurate estimates of the distribution of future taxable income. We show that additional debt would provide firms with much smaller tax benefits than previously thought, and when expected distress costs and difficult-to-measure non-debt tax shields are also considered, it appears plausible that most firms have tax-efficient capital structures.

Suggested Citation

  • Blouin, Jennifer & Core, John E. & Guay, Wayne, 2010. "Have the tax benefits of debt been overestimated?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 98(2), pages 195-213, November.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:jfinec:v:98:y:2010:i:2:p:195-213
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304-405X(10)00106-6
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Brown, Lawrence D., 1993. "Earnings forecasting research: its implications for capital markets research," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 295-320, November.
    2. John Y. Campbell & Jens Hilscher & Jan Szilagyi, 2008. "In Search of Distress Risk," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 63(6), pages 2899-2939, December.
    3. Brooks, LeRoy D & Buckmaster, Dale A, 1976. "Further Evidence on the Time Series Properties of Accounting Income," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 31(5), pages 1359-1373, December.
    4. John R. Graham & Michael L. Lemmon & James S. Schallheim, 1998. "Debt, Leases, Taxes, and the Endogeneity of Corporate Tax Status," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 53(1), pages 131-162, February.
    5. Fama, Eugene F. & French, Kenneth R., 1997. "Industry costs of equity," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(2), pages 153-193, February.
    6. Heitor Almeida & Thomas Philippon, 2007. "The Risk‐Adjusted Cost of Financial Distress," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 62(6), pages 2557-2586, December.
    7. Graham, John R., 1996. "Debt and the marginal tax rate," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(1), pages 41-73, May.
    8. Brown, Lawrence D., 1993. "Reply to commentaries on "Earnings forecasting research: its implications for capital markets research"," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 343-344, November.
    9. Gregor Andrade & Steven N. Kaplan, 1998. "How Costly is Financial (Not Economic) Distress? Evidence from Highly Leveraged Transactions that Became Distressed," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 53(5), pages 1443-1493, October.
    10. John R. Graham, 2000. "How Big Are the Tax Benefits of Debt?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 55(5), pages 1901-1941, October.
    11. Barber, Brad M. & Lyon, John D., 1996. "Detecting abnormal operating performance: The empirical power and specification of test statistics," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(3), pages 359-399, July.
    12. Carlos A. Molina, 2005. "Are Firms Underleveraged? An Examination of the Effect of Leverage on Default Probabilities," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 60(3), pages 1427-1459, June.
    13. Graham, John R., 1996. "Proxies for the corporate marginal tax rate," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(2), pages 187-221, October.
    14. Fama, Eugene F & MacBeth, James D, 1973. "Risk, Return, and Equilibrium: Empirical Tests," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 81(3), pages 607-636, May-June.
    15. Dechow, Patricia M. & Sloan, Richard G., 1997. "Returns to contrarian investment strategies: Tests of naive expectations hypotheses," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(1), pages 3-27, January.
    16. Brown, Philip, 1993. "Comments on 'Earnings forecasting research: its implications for capital markets research' by L. Brown," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 331-335, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Patricia M. Fairfield & Sundaresh Ramnath & Teri Lombardi Yohn, 2009. "Do Industry‐Level Analyses Improve Forecasts of Financial Performance?," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(1), pages 147-178, March.
    2. Amilcar A. Menichini, 2017. "On the value and determinants of the interest tax shields," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 48(3), pages 725-748, April.
    3. Hou, Kewei & van Dijk, Mathijs A. & Zhang, Yinglei, 2012. "The implied cost of capital: A new approach," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(3), pages 504-526.
    4. Kothari, S. P., 2001. "Capital markets research in accounting," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 31(1-3), pages 105-231, September.
    5. Agrawal, Ashwini K. & Matsa, David A., 2013. "Labor unemployment risk and corporate financing decisions," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 108(2), pages 449-470.
    6. George, Thomas J. & Hwang, Chuan-Yang, 2010. "A resolution of the distress risk and leverage puzzles in the cross section of stock returns," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 96(1), pages 56-79, April.
    7. Chemmanur, Thomas J. & Cheng, Yingmei & Zhang, Tianming, 2013. "Human capital, capital structure, and employee pay: An empirical analysis," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 110(2), pages 478-502.
    8. Armen Hovakimian & Ayla Kayhan & Sheridan Titman, 2012. "Are Corporate Default Probabilities Consistent with the Static Trade-off Theory?," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 25(2), pages 315-340.
    9. Alexander P. Paton & Damien Cannavan & Stephen Gray & Khoa Hoang, 2020. "Analyst versus model‐based earnings forecasts: implied cost of capital applications," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 60(4), pages 4061-4092, December.
    10. Elkamhi, Redouane & Ericsson, Jan & Parsons, Christopher A., 2012. "The cost and timing of financial distress," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 105(1), pages 62-81.
    11. Vitor Azevedo & Patrick Bielstein & Manuel Gerhart, 2021. "Earnings forecasts: the case for combining analysts’ estimates with a cross-sectional model," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 56(2), pages 545-579, February.
    12. Céspedes, Jacelly & González, Maximiliano & Molina, Carlos A., 2010. "Ownership and capital structure in Latin America," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 63(3), pages 248-254, March.
    13. Mest, David P. & Plummer, Elizabeth, 1999. "Transitory and persistent earnings components as reflected in analysts' short-term and long-term earnings forecasts: evidence from a nonlinear model," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 15(3), pages 291-308, July.
    14. Kjell Bjørn Nordal & Randi Næs, 2012. "Mean Reversion in Profitability for Non†listed Firms," European Financial Management, European Financial Management Association, vol. 18(5), pages 929-949, November.
    15. van Lent, L.A.G.M., 1999. "Incomplete contracting theory in empirical accounting research," Other publications TiSEM 088f797d-9fa4-4081-98f4-1, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    16. Stephen H. Penman & Theodore Sougiannis, 1998. "A Comparison of Dividend, Cash Flow, and Earnings Approaches to Equity Valuation," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 15(3), pages 343-383, September.
    17. Graham, John R., 1999. "Do personal taxes affect corporate financing decisions?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(2), pages 147-185, August.
    18. Dan Dhaliwal & Linda Krull & Oliver Zhen Li & William Moser, 2005. "Dividend Taxes and Implied Cost of Equity Capital," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 43(5), pages 675-708, December.
    19. Clemente-Almendros, José A. & Sogorb-Mira, Francisco, 2018. "Costs of debt, tax benefits and a new measure of non-debt tax shields: examining debt conservatism in Spanish listed firms," Revista de Contabilidad - Spanish Accounting Review, Elsevier, vol. 21(2), pages 162-175.
    20. Sati P. Bandyopadhyay & Alan Guoming Huang & Kevin Jialin Sun & Tony S. Wirjanto, 2017. "The return premiums to accruals quality," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 48(1), pages 83-115, January.

    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:eee:jfinec:v:98:y:2010:i:2:p:195-213. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/505576 .

    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.