This paper reviews recent evidence analyzing the link between earnings management and corporate tax avoidance and considers the implications for how policymakers should evaluate the financial reporting environment facing firms. A real–world tax shelter is dissected to illustrate how tax...

Many features of U.S. tax policy towards multinational firms — including the governing principle of capital export neutrality, the byzantine system of expense allocation, and anti-inversion legislation — reflect the intuition that building “strong fences” around the United States...

This paper reassesses the burden of the current U.S. international tax regime and reconsiders well–known welfare benchmarks used to guide international tax reform. Reinventing corporate tax policy requires that international considerations be placed front and center in the debate on how to tax...

This paper analyzes the effect of repatriation taxes on dividend payments by the foreign affiliates of American multinational firms. The United States taxes the foreign incomes of American companies, grants credits for any foreign income taxes paid, and defers any taxes due on the unrepatriated...

This paper introduces "capital ownership neutrality" (CON) and "national ownership neutrality" (NON) as benchmarks for evaluating the desirability of international tax reforms, and applies them to analyze recent U.S. tax reform proposals. Tax systems satisfy CON if they do not distort the...

Abstract - This paper investigates the determinants of corporate expatriations. American corporations that seek to avoid U.S. taxes on their foreign incomes can do so by becoming foreign corporations, typically by "inverting" the corporate structure, so that the foreign subsidiary becomes the...

Deferral of U.S. taxes on foreign source income is commonly characterized as a subsidy to foreign investment, as reflected in its inclusion among “tax expenditures” and occasional calls for its repeal. This paper analyzes the extent to which tax deferral and other policies inefficiently...

The spirited comment by Grubert (2005) on Desai and Hines (2004) is a useful continuation in the ongoing debate on the appropriate taxation of foreign income. It raises numerous points on which intuition can easily go astray and, thereby, indirectly illustrates the benefits of hard and...