The issue of tax-motivated income shifting within multinational firms has attracted increasing global attention in recent years. It is of central importance to many current policy debates, including those related to recent initiatives by the OECD on base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) and to...

An extensive literature has analyzed the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) legislation enacted in 2002, but its social welfare consequences remain controversial. One of the most significant provisions of SOX – auditor attestation of internal controls under Section 404(b) – has been applied only to firms...

Firms’ Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activity has become the subject of a large literature in recent years. This paper analyzes CSR activity using quasi-experimental variation created by Section 135 of India’s Companies Act of 2013, which requires (on a “comply-or-explain” basis)...

Growing controversy surrounds the impact of labor unions on law enforcement behavior. Critics argue that unions impede organizational reform and insulate officers from discipline for misconduct. Yet collective bargaining tends to increase wages, which could improve officer behavior. We provide...

This paper discusses the potential consequences of the international tax provisions of the recent Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA), drawing on existing research. The TCJA’s dividend exemption provision is expected to eliminate distortions to the amount and timing of dividend repatriations. However,...

Cross-border tax evasion has emerged in recent years as a central issue in tax enforcement. Traditionally, the legal regime governing cross-border tax enforcement was based on information exchange upon request. In 2010, the US Congress enacted the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA),...

The reform of corporate and business taxation is central to current tax policy debates in the United States. This paper provides a framework for analyzing reform proposals by describing the lessons from current economic research for business tax reform, addressing both international and domestic...

The governments of many developing countries seek to attract inbound foreign direct investment (FDI) through the use of tax incentives for multinational corporations (MNCs). The effectiveness of these tax incentives depends crucially on MNCs’ residence country tax regime, especially where the...

The consequences for countries of past foreign rule are the subject of a vast literature across history and the social sciences. This paper constructs a novel measure of past foreign (or minority) rule - the genetic distance of a country's ruling elite in the year 1900 from the country's ethnic...

The use of tax havens by multinational corporations (MNCs) has attracted increasing attention and scrutiny in recent years. This paper provides an exposition of the academic literature on this topic. It begins with an overview of the basic facts regarding MNCs' use of havens, which are...