The present study was designed to determine the relationship between corporate governance and tax avoidance in an international setting. Financial and governance data sourced from the Datastream database for a sample of Japanese and UK firms between 2012 and 2017 are used. First, we examine the...

Tax law is often uncertain. In particular, the use of tax shelters tends to be in the "grey area" between illegal tax evasion and legal tax avoidance. In this paper I show that uncertainty in tax law can help achieve higher efficiency than allowing or disallowing a tax shelter with certainty....

This paper analyses some fiscal aspects of mortgage debt in the EU. It first describes the main fiscal instruments that governments use to affect mortgage-financed home-ownership. In the empirical part, real mortgage debt growth is analysed for 15 EU countries using pooled regressions. Fiscal...

This paper analyses the relationship between corporate governance and tax avoidance. We use a regression discontinuity design (RDD) in a two-stage instrumental variable and take advantage of the exogenous variation in the index membership around the DAX and MDAX threshold. We suppose the...

This research is motivated by the Omani government's desire to reduce tax avoidance and bolster tax revenue collected from financial institutions. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of overlapped audit committee (AC) chairs and other directors on tax avoidance practice and...

We examine whether worker representation on corporate boards results in improved monitoring or payroll maximization. Several economic theories predict that worker representatives would use control and voting rights in the boardroom to transform firm assets into private benefits and increased...

We derive determinants of tax avoidance by means of a multi-task principal-agent model. We extend prevailing models by integrating both corporate and individual income taxation as well as by including tax planning effort in the agent's action portfolio. Our model shows novel and apparently...

Venture capital has become a dominant form of innovation finance, used by many high-tech startups. Europe lags the U.S. in both VC activity and the creation of successful startups, and has recently been surpassed by China. Few European countries have rates of VC activity commensurable to their...

In some classes of models, taxes at the owner level are "neutral" and have no effect on firm activity. However, this tax neutrality is sensitive to assumptions and no longer holds in more complex models. We review recent research that incorporates greater complexity in studying the link between...

One response to uncertainty and transactions costs in VC-finance is to compensate founders (and other key personnel) with stock options under complex contracts. Entrepreneurs are granted stock options contingent on firm performance, vesting and other criteria. While most countries tax stock...