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We study the importance of owner wages and dividends as alternative payout channels in privately held firms. Using data on all Swedish closely held corporations and their owner–managers over the period 2000–2009, we find that dividends comprise one-fourth of total payout to owner–managers. Dividends are used as a flexible payout channel. Wages are the preferred payout channel and are rather sticky. Choice of payout channel and level of payout are affected by dividend and wage taxation. Consistent with the difference in flexibility across payout channels, shareholder taxes have a stronger impact on dividends than on wages.
We test whether dividend taxes affect corporate investments. We exploit Sweden’s 2006 dividend tax cut of 10 percentage points for closely held corporations and five percentage points for widely held corporations. Using rich administrative panel data and tripledifference estimators, we find that this dividend tax cut does not affect aggregate investment but that it affects the allocation of corporate investment. Cash-constrained firms increase investment after the dividend tax cut relative to cash-rich firms. Reallocation is stronger among closely held firms that experience a larger tax cut. This result is explained by higher external equity in cashconstrained firms and by higher dividends in cash-rich firms after the tax cut. The heterogeneous investment responses imply that the dividend tax cut raises efficiency by improving allocation of investment.
Delegated monitoring
(2012)
To highlight the value of delegated monitoring through bond trustees, we examine the high-yield corporate bond market where default risk is high, covenants are numerous, and market values are particularly sensitive to wealth transfers. We show that bond trustees that also act as underwriters in the low-grade bond segment, but not the market’s largest trustees, reduce firms’ at-issue bond yields by 33 to 40 basis points. Accordingly, we report significantly lower bond default and downgrade risks associated with superior monitoring by these trustees. These pricing effects remain when we control for self-selection and do not hinge on whether we solely consider trustee identity or interaction terms of trustees with covenant variables that measure necessary monitoring effort. Our results can be interpreted as evidence for informational and reputational spillover effects of banks providing several services in the high-yield market segment.