Conference Agenda

This paper studies how the design of bilateral tax treaties (BTTs) affects cross-border banking between developed and developing economies. Using bilateral loan data from the Bank for International Settlements combined with newly assembled information on treaty provisions, we examine whether specific treaty clauses shape international credit flows. We find strong heterogeneity across treaty designs. BTTs that include tax sparing provisions, which preserve recipient-country tax incentives granted to foreign banks and investors, lead to substantial increases in cross-border lending to both banks and non-bank borrowers. In contrast, standard BTTs without tax sparing reduce interbank lending and have little effect on lending to non-banks. The evidence is consistent with tax sparing sustaining the effectiveness of investment incentives in developing countries, while provisions related to information exchange constrain tax-motivated financial activity. Overall, the results show that the content of tax treaties, rather than their mere existence, plays a central role in shaping international banking flows.

This paper studies how ownership structure relates to dividend policy in private firms, focusing on the difference between family-controlled and widely held firms. Using a panel of UK private firms from 2008 to 2024 and a refined time-varying ownership classification, we find that widely held firms pay lower dividends on average than family-controlled firms. However, among larger firms, widely held firms pay higher dividends than matched family-controlled firms. We also find that widely held firms smooth dividends more strongly, adjusting payouts more gradually in response to changes in earnings. Overall, these results contribute to the literature on dividend policy in private firms and suggest that ownership concentration plays an important role in influencing corporate payout decisions.

This paper examines how the introduction of the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) affected the financing choices of UK non-financial corporations (NFCs). Using granular regulatory data covering the period 2016-2024, we show that banks more exposed to the LCR increased their holdings of high-quality liquid assets but reduced lending to NFCs. A Difference-in-Difference (DiD) analysis confirms that these lending cuts prompted NFCs to shift towards non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs), with the effect stronger for firms with shorter banking relationships. We further assess the consequences of this reallocation. NFCs that relied more on NBFIs did not reduce investment; instead, they increased it, particularly in its tangible component. Despite concerns over weaker regulation and risk-taking in NBFIs, we find no evidence of higher risk: treated NFCs display lower risk scores and a reduced probability of becoming inactive.

Firms apply internal discount rates far above their cost of capital. This hurdle rate premium persists even among large cash-rich incumbents with no apparent financing constraints, and rises further for financially distressed firms. We show that both facts follow from creative destruction interacting with financial frictions. Embedding two independent Poisson risks --- technology replacement and forced liquidation --- into a continuous-time model of investment under financial frictions, we derive a closed-form, four-component hurdle rate whose parts are additively separable and each driven by an orthogonal set of measurable firm characteristics. A structural boundary condition jointly identifies the model's two key parameters from two independent datasets with no remaining degrees of freedom.

The model matches the observed premium of large healthy firms ---7.3 percentage points --- and predicts a premium of approximately 12 percentage points for distressed firms, consistent with survey evidence. The estimates imply that eighty-eight percent of project-level technology retirements are obsolescence-driven, a restriction the vintage capital literature independently corroborates. The model generates nine falsifiable cross-sectional and lifecycle restrictions.