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Corporate Tax, Cost of Debt, Cost of Equity and Capital Structure: a Case Study of Reits and Conventional Real Estate Firms in the Uk

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Corporate Tax, Cost of Debt, Cost of Equity and Capital Structure: A case study of REITs and conventional real estate firms in the UK

University of Groningen
Faculty of Economics and Business

BSc International Business

January 2013

Table of contents

1. Introduction 4
2. REITs 7
3. Literature Review 9 3.1 Capital Structure Irrelevance 9 3.2 Present Models 10
4. Data and Methodology 12 4.1 Regression 12
5. Findings and Discussion 16
6. Conclusion 20
7. Appendix 21
8. Bibliography 30

Abstract

In January 2007 the UK adopted the globally successful real estate investment trust (REIT) regime, allowing real estate firms to adopt the REIT status with the benefit of immediate exemption from …show more content…

Furthermore, I expect that REITs use relatively less debt for financing, because of the relatively higher cost of debt.

Already in 1958, Modigliani and Miller have pointed the discussion of capital structure towards the cost of debt and equity. According to their first proposition, in a world of no corporate taxes and with perfect markets, financial leverage has no effect on a firm’s value. In their second proposition, they state that the cost of equity equals a linear function defined by the required return on assets and the cost of debt (Modigliani and Miller, 1958).

As negative aspects of debt, e.g. personal tax loss and bankruptcy costs however do exist in reality, Miller (1977) elaborates that leverage will either have no or a negative effect on the firm’s value, hence untaxed firms should favor equity.
Nevertheless, firms have used leverage even before corporate taxes have been introduced (Maris and Elayan, 1990). This implies the existence of some market imperfections, which benefit the use of debt financing, thus enable a trade-off of the cost and benefits of debt resulting in an optimal capital structure, where marginal cost equal marginal benefits.

In general, the majority of existing research is set up by taking the security issuance choice as the dependent variable and then tests empirically for determinants based on data from one type of companies. It needs to be taken into consideration that security issue decision and capital

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