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 shelter...

Managers appear to manipulate firm earnings through their characterizations of pension assets to capital markets and alter investment decisions to justify, and capitalize on, these manipulations. Managers are more aggressive with assumed long-term rates of return when their assumptions have a...

Managers appear to manipulate firm earnings through their characterizations of pension assets to capital markets and alter investment decisions to justify, and capitalize on, these manipulations. Managers are more aggressive with assumed long-term rates of return when their assumptions have a...

The average cash-to-assets ratio for U.S. industrial firms more than doubles from 1980 to 2006. A measure of the economic importance of this increase in cash holdings is that at the end of the sample period, the average firm can pay back all of its debt obligations with its cash holdings; in...

In the absence of owners, how effective are the constraints imposed by the state in promoting effective firm governance? This paper develops state-level indices of governance environment facing not-for-profits and examines the effects of these rules on not-for-profit behavior. Stronger...

In this paper, we explain how enterprise risk management creates value for shareholders. In contrast to the existing finance literature, we emphasize the organizational benefits of risk management. We show how a firm should choose its risk appetite and measure risk when implementing enterprise...

Merton Miller was at the center of the transformation of academic finance from a descriptive field to a science. His principal contribution to this transformation was the introduction of arbitrage arguments which underlie most theoretical contributions in finance and remain central to the way...

This paper describes the International Finance course at Harvard Business School for instructors considering adopting the associated material. The paper begins by arguing that the forces of globalization have fundamentally changed the scope and activities of firms thereby altering the practice...

Legal rules, politics and behavioral factors have all been emphasized as explanatory factors in analyses of the determinants of the concentration of corporate ownership and stock market participation. An extension of standard tax clientele arguments demonstrates that changes in the progressivity...