Tax law is often uncertain. In particular, the use of tax shelters tends to be in the "grey area" between illegal tax evasion and legal tax avoidance. In this paper I show that uncertainty in tax law can help achieve higher efficiency than allowing or disallowing a tax shelter with certainty....

Paul Daugerdas gained notoriety for himself and his erstwhile firm, Jenkens & Gilchrist, as the designer of a tax shelter that uses contingent liabilities to generate artificial tax losses on a grand scale. The basic shelter transaction is surprisingly simple. In essence, it uses offsetting...

Recently, taxpayers prevailed at trial in two federal tax shelter cases: TIFD 111-E Inc. v. United States, 2009 WL 3208650 (D. Conn. Oct. 7, 2009) ("Castle Harbour III"), and Consolidated Edison Co. v. United States, 2009 WL 3418533 (Fed. Cl. Oct. 21, 2009) ("Con Ed"). Doing full justice to...

In Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue, Michael Keen and Joel Slemrod have written a fantastic book that collects and loosely organizes a treasure trove of anecdotes about tax systems, trivia, and events around the world and throughout history. In many respects the book, which endeavors to include...

In August 2004, the U.K. adopted a tax shelter regulatory regime after extensive study of the U.S. and Australian regimes. The result of the project was a system that incorporates two of three elements of the U.S. system. This paper reviews the U.S. tax shelter provisions and compares the new...

This past July 1 marked a Tax Shelter anniversary. On that date twelve years ago, the IRS issued Notice 2003-47, challenging the deferral of income by corporate executives using the so-called ECS, an acronym variously interpreted to mean the Executive Compensation Solution, the Executive...

The Research Paper commences with an overview of Pillar One and Pillar Two followed by detailed discussions on salient provisions of Pillar Two. Pillar Two is envisaged to have a widespread impact on Small Island Developing States (SIDS) which are a distinct group of 38 United Nations (UN)...

We investigate whether the adoption of an intellectual property box increases innovative activity and what type of firms benefit. We examine the adoption of the intellectual property box in Belgium because it allows us to cleanly identify the impact on innovative activity and effective tax...

We exploit a quasi-experimental setting to cleanly identify the effect of the adoption of an intellectual property box (IP box) on innovative activity and effective tax rates. We document an increase in innovative activity, including patent applications, grants, and highly-skilled employment, at...