Starting with Vickrey (1945) and Mirrlees (1971), the optimal tax literature has studied the design of a personal income tax. The assumed ideal would be to tax earnings ability. Earnings ability is unobservable for tax purposes, however. Past papers have focused instead on designing a tax on...

We study the stock price reaction to news about corporate tax aggressiveness. We find that, on average, a company's stock price declines when there is news about its involvement in tax shelters. We find some limited evidence for cross-sectional variation in the reaction. For example, the...

We examine the effects of a 1992 income tax law change in India that eliminated the tax penalty on wages paid to partners in partnership firms using a large dataset covering all registered plants in the manufacturing sector over the period 1986 to 1995. This tax law change provides a unique...