Tax Rates Changes,Bankruptcy Costs and Asymmetric Capital Structure Adjustment
研究了税率变化如何影响企业资本结构调整，发现高杠杆企业对税率上升更敏感，低杠杆企业对税率下降更敏感，为权衡理论提供了新证据。
Previous studies investigate the impacts of tax rates changes on capital structure adjustment,conditional on a fixed bankruptcy costs,thus can provide only limited evidence to the trade off theory.This paper reinvestigates this question with a careful consideration of the trade off between the tax shield benefits and bankruptcy costs during the process of capital structure adjustment.Theoretical analysis shows that when the debt overhang effects are considered,firms may adjust their capital structure asymmetrically as tax rates change.The reason is that,when firm raise debt ratio as tax rates rise,the marginal tax shield benefit is a constant,but the marginal bankruptcy costs rise convexly.This implies,given the same degree of tax rate change,firms with high leverage may act differendy relative to those with low leverage.We provide evidence this argument.The results show that,high leverage firms are more sensitive to the increase of tax rates,while low leverage firms are more sensitive to the decrease of tax rates.Our results contribute to the tax and the capital structure literature, and have important practical significance to understand the financing behavior of the corporate under the adjustment of tax rate.