Although prior studies provide evidence on the financial reporting incentives to inflate core earnings through classification shifting (e.g., shifting core expenses to income-decreasing non-core items), few examine the tax-related incentive to report lower core earnings through classification...

The tax auditing context is illustrative of a more general set of situations in which regulators attempt to extract information from entities over whom they have oversight (Border and Sobel 1987). Hence evaluating the impact of various features of the tax setting can provide important insights...