Motivated by the action plan for a European capital markets union (CMU), this paper analyzes the potential for legal harmonization and convergence in institutional quality to affect capital market integration. Based on hand-collected data on the implementation of EU-directives, our analysis yields three key insights. First, legal harmonization promotes portfolio equity holdings. Second, discrepancies ...
Regulatory bank levies set incentives for banks to reduce leverage. At the same time, corporate income taxation makes funding through debt more attractive. In this paper, we explore how regulatory levies affect bank capital structure, depending on corporate income taxation. Based on bank balance sheet data from 2006 to 2014 for a panel of EU-banks, our analysis yields three main results: The introduction ...
