This paper examines the impact of politicians' ideological preferences on corporate taxation. Our tests exploit the implementation of the Reform and Opening-up policy in China in 1978 that significantly weakens the communist ideology. We find that, in the post-reform period, the effective tax...

We investigate whether and how the federal judiciary affects corporate tax planning. We find that firms engage in less aggressive tax planning when Circuit Court and Tax Court judges are more liberal. This effect is economically significant and robust across various measures of tax planning. We...

Prior studies on the relation between corporate taxes and future macroeconomic growth present contradictory evidence. We argue this mixed evidence is at least partly due to the use of statutory corporate tax rates which ignore the complexity of tax exemptions, tax deductions, tax enforcement and...

We use path analysis to investigate how corporate tax avoidance is priced in bond yields and bank loan spreads. We find that approximately one half of the total effect of tax avoidance on bond yields is explained through the negative effect of tax avoidance on future pre-tax cash flow levels and...

This study examines the effect of managers' career concerns on tax avoidance using the staggered recognition by state courts of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD), a trade secret protection doctrine which places greater restrictions on managers from joining or forming a rival company. We...

Prior studies on the relation between corporate taxes and future macroeconomic growth present contradictory evidence. We argue this mixed evidence is at least partly due to the use of statutory corporate tax rates which ignore the complexity of tax exemptions, tax deductions, tax enforcement and...

This paper discusses the issues surrounding the proposals to conform financial accounting income and taxable income. The two incomes diverged in the late 1990s with financial accounting income becoming increasingly greater than taxable income through the year 2000. While the cause of this...