We examine effective tax rates (ETRs) for 9,022 multinationals from 87 countries from 2006 to 2011. We find that, despite extensive investments in international tax avoidance, multinationals headquartered in Japan, the U.S., and some high-tax European countries continue to face substantially...

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...

To our knowledge, this paper provides the most comprehensive analysis of firm-level corporate income tax expenses to date. We use publicly available financial statement information to estimate firm-level effective tax rates (ETRs) for 10,642 corporations from 85 countries from 1988 to 2007. We...

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 tests whether firms altered their dividend and share repurchase policies in response to the 2003 reductions in shareholder tax rates. We predict that firms substituted dividends for repurchases, because the reduction in dividend tax rates exceeded the reduction in the capital gains...

This paper assesses whether insurers' state taxes reduce purchases of property-casualty coverage. Tests are conducted using state aggregates of insurer-level data from publicly-available, annual accounting reports for 1993, 1994, and 1995. A positive relation between self-insurance and state...

We hypothesize that, in their annual accounting reports, insurers allocate premiums and losses from multistate policies to reduce total state taxes. To test this prediction, we examine firm-level data, collected from the publicly-available statutory reports used to compute tax bases and filed...

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...