The financial behavior of corporations has changed greatly in the last ten years. Previously most of the cash that stockholders received from corporations took the form of dividends, and economists' models that have dividends as the ultimate determinant of equity values were not far off the...

Penalties for tax evasion are typically financial, but many jurisdictions also utilize collateral sanctions that deny access to some government-provided service. To learn about the effectiveness of such penalties, we examine a U.S. policy restricting passport access for taxpayers with...

The analysis of the effects ofcapital gains taxation requires a careful modelling both of the details of the tax code and the imperfections in the capital market. Under the standard assumptions concerning perfect capital marketsand under the standard idealizations of the tax code, there are...

This paper studies tax evasion at the top of the U.S. income distribution using IRS micro-data from (i) random audits, (ii) targeted enforcement activities, and (iii) operational audits. Drawing on this unique combination of data, we demonstrate empirically that random audits underestimate tax...

It is often claimed that multinational firms avoid taxes by shifting income from high-tax to low-tax countries. Using a five year panel of data for two hundred large U.S. manufacturing firms, we find that U.S. tax liability, as a fraction either of U.S. sales or U.S. assets, is related to the...

In 2008, the IRS initiated efforts to curb the use of offshore accounts to evade taxes. This paper uses administrative microdata to examine the impact of the enforcement efforts on taxpayers' reporting of offshore accounts and income. Enforcement caused approximately 60,000 individuals to...

This paper studies how cultural norms and enforcement policies influence illicit corporate activities. Using confidential IRS audit data, we show that corporations with owners from countries with higher corruption norms engage in higher amounts of tax evasion in the U.S. This effect is strong...

This paper uses account-level information, reported to the IRS by foreign financial institutions under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), to produce new evidence on the foreign financial wealth of U.S. households. We find that U.S. taxpayers hold around $4 trillion in foreign...

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in the landmark 2018 Wayfair case greatly improved state governments' ability to enforce collection of sales taxes on a destination basis. This has reduced state tax competition with an essentially-untaxed internet, but has brought traditional cross-border...

We study the valuation of state-issued tax-exempt municipal bonds and find that there are significant convenience premia in their prices. These premia parallel those identified in Treasury markets. We find evidence that these premia are tax related. Specifically, the premia are related to...