This paper analyzes the extent to which firms use trade credit to reallocate capital in response to tax incentives. Tax-induced differences in pretax returns encourage the use of trade credit to reallocate capital from firms facing low tax rates to those facing high tax rates. Evidence from the...

This paper analyzes the impact on firm behavior of the Homeland Investment Act of 2004, which provided a one-time tax holiday for the repatriation of foreign earnings by U.S. multinationals. The analysis controls for endogeneity and omitted variable bias by using instruments that identify the...

Investors can access foreign diversification opportunities through either foreign portfolio investment (FPI) or foreign direct investment (FDI). By combining data on US outbound FPI and FDI, this paper analyzes whether the composition of US outbound capital flows reflect efforts to bypass home...

U.S. corporations hold significant amounts of cash on their balance sheets, and these cash holdings have been justified in the existing empirical literature by transaction costs and precautionary motives. An additional explanation, considered in this study, is that U.S. multinational firms hold...

How does rising foreign investment influence domestic economic activity? Firms whose foreign operations grow rapidly exhibit coincident rapid growth of domestic operations, but this pattern alone is inconclusive, as foreign and domestic business activities are jointly determined. This study uses...

This paper analyzes the factors influencing whether countries become tax havens. Roughly 15 percent of countries are tax havens; as has been widely observed, these countries tend to be small and affluent. This paper documents another robust empirical regularity: better-governed countries are...

This paper considers the effect of taxation on the location of foreign direct investment (FDI) and taxable income reported by multinational firms with particular attention to the regional dynamics of tax competition and the role of chains of ownership. Confidential affiliate-level data are used...

How do investors value managerial actions designed solely to minimize corporate tax obligations? Using a framework in which managers' tax sheltering decisions are related to their ability to divert value, this paper predicts that the effect of tax avoidance on firm value should vary...

This paper examines the impact of local tax rates and capital market conditions on the level and composition of borrowing by foreign affiliates of American multinational corporations. The evidence indicates that 10 percent higher local tax rates are associated with 2.8 percent higher debt/asset...

This paper analyzes the links between corporate tax avoidance, the growth of high-powered incentives for managers, and the structure of corporate governance. We develop and test a simple model that highlights the role of complementarities between tax sheltering and managerial diversion in...