I examine differences between effective tax rates (ETRs) and book-tax differences (BTDs) as alternative measures of corporate tax avoidance or tax aggressiveness. When BTDs are scaled by pretax income, the scaled BTD is statistically equivalent to the ETR. When BTDs are scaled by assets the...

We investigate whether low Cash ETRs are associated with two distinct effects — tax avoidance and low earnings quality — and if so, whether the two effects can be separated. Separating these effects is important: if upward earnings management is driving low Cash ETRs, inferences based on tax...

We investigate whether firms use pretax cash flow freed-up by tax avoidance to make real investments. We expect uncertainty about tax avoidance to affect how this cash is used, and predict that firms facing low (high) financial constraints will use more of this cash for real investments...

We test whether tax avoidance strategies are associated with greater firm risk. We find that low tax rates tend to be more persistent than high tax rates and that measures of tax avoidance commonly used in the literature are generally not associated with either future tax rate volatility or...