This paper examines how credit guarantees and government subsidies impact investment in a regime-switching model. We provide new explicit pricing formulas for a general standard asset. Almost all common corporate securities’ prices can be easily derived by the explicit formulas though project cash flows are driven by both a Brownian motion and a two-state Markov chain. We provide a method about how governments should specify a proper tax subsidy standard for a given tax rate to motivate a firm to invest in a project in the way they wish. If the tax subsidy is sufficiently high (low), an overinvestment (underinvestment) occurs. The higher the tax rate, the more significant the overinvestment (underinvestment). We pin down the subsidy amount required for motivating a firm to invest immediately and fix the optimal capital structure with government subsidies.

This paper introduces an integrated asset-liability management model that allows for the joint quantitative analysis of capital structure choices, pension fund allocation decisions and rational pricing of liabilities. We confirm that capital structure decisions have a substantial impact on the value of pension claims, and we provide a quantitative assessment of the mispricing induced by the use of an arbitrary regulatory discount rate. We also present a quantitative assessment of the asset substitution effect implied by a change in the pension fund allocation to risky assets taking place after the corporate and pension obligation claims have been issued.

We test the effect of institutional quality on capital structure in the microfinance setting. In doing this, we rely on data from 532 microfinance institutions (MFIs) located in 73 countries dotted across the six microfinance regions in the world. We observe that institutional quality exhibits a robust negative and statistically significant relationship with capital structure in both the short and long run, implying that MFIs in countries with a better institutional environment are less likely to utilize more debt. Our moderation analysis furnishes us with evidence that the presence of women on the board of an MFI significantly moderates the relationship between institutional quality and its capital structure. We show that in the presence of more female representation on the boards of MFIs, the tendency of MFIs using less debt is higher.

Capital regulation is critical to address distortions and externalities from intense conflicts of interest in banking and from the failure of markets to counter incentives for recklessness. The approaches to capital regulation in Basel III and related proposals are based on flawed analyses of the relevant tradeoffs. The flaws in the regulations include dangerously low equity levels, a complex and problematic system of risk weights that exacerbates systemic risk and adds distortions, and unnecessary reliance on poor equity substitutes. The underlying problem is a breakdown of governance and lack of accountability to the public throughout the system, including policymakers and economists.

We present empirical evidence on the funding and portfolio allocation of around 200 Dutch corporate pension funds over the period 1996-2005, with a special focus on the influence of the sponsoring firm. We find that unprofitable and small firms contribute less to their pension funds than profitable and large firms, consistent with theories of capital market imperfections. Sponsor contributions are found to be positively correlated with leverage, suggesting that tax effects play a role. Defined benefit funds invest relatively more in equity and less in bonds than their defined contribution counterparts, which is in accordance with the risk shifting theory.

The paper presents results of an ongoing research project on corporate financing patterns in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) since 1999. It addresses three broad issues. What are the specifics of corporate financing in CEE compared to countries in Western Europe? What country institutional and company factors may explain the similarities and differences between capital structures in the EU-15 and New Member States (NMS)? What are the major convergence and divergence trends in corporate financing patterns in an enlarged Europe? The study analyses the interactions between country institutional differences, firm ownership structures, other firm-specific characteristics and corporate financial patterns in both the EU-15 and NMS. It summarises the firm-level evidence and outlines several unresolved questions and major dimensions for further research.