This paper investigates whether dividends are informative about a firm's future earnings. We examine this issue by investigating the association between current year stock returns and current and future earnings for firms that pay dividends in the current year as compared to firms that do not...

Recent corporate accounting reporting scandals and aggressive corporate tax shelters have led for calls for regulatory reform. One such call is to conform (or reduce the gap between) the calculation of book and taxable income. Proponents of conformity focus on perceived benefits while ignoring...

A distinctive feature of stock options is that they create incentives for managers to take risks. For a sample of 6,439 CEO-year observations over 1992-1999, we find that risk-taking incentives offered by CEO's stock options (the sensitivity of ESO values to stock return volatility) are...

We estimate the relation between top 5 executive stock option (ESO) grants and future earnings to examine whether incentive alignment or rent extraction by top managers explains option granting behavior. The future operating income associated with a dollar of Black-Scholes value of an ESO grant...

Recent evidence and statements in Harris and Kemsley (1999) suggests that shareholder-level dividend taxes on retained earnings are fully impounded at the top statutory rate into stock prices. We re-examine these claims and results. Using the traditional definition of dividend tax...

We survey companies and find that many use incorrect tax rate inputs into important corporate decisions. Specifically, many companies use an average tax rate (the GAAP effective tax rate, ETR) to evaluate incremental decisions, rather than using the theoretically correct marginal tax rate. We...

We examine whether the information content of earnings is inversely related to the degree of conformity between financial accounting income and taxable income. Our inquiry exploits a natural experiment first examined by Guenther et al. (1997) in which a set of U.S. firms were forced to increase...

This paper explains firm disclosures of the tax benefits of employee stock options and discusses the implications of this disclosure for academic research studies and financial statement users. We do this in order to show that there are important implications for empirical research studies and...

We analyze survey responses from nearly 600 tax executives to better understand corporate decisions about real investment location and profit repatriation. Our evidence indicates that avoiding financial accounting income tax expense is as important as avoiding cash taxes when corporations decide...