This paper examines the effects of banning contingent fees for tax return preparation services. It develops a principal-agent model in which a taxpayer contracts with a tax practitioner to attempt to resolve tax law uncertainty. The contract must induce the practitioner to do research and take...

This study examines a setting in which a tax reporting decision is delegated to a firm 's tax manager. Using financial accounting measures of tax expense to evaluate the tax manager allows the fi rm to efficiently attain the level of tax avoidance it prefers, despite the fact that the...

Loss firms are an economically significant and growing segment of the population of publicly traded corporations. Relatively little is known about the tax positions of loss firms because they are typically dropped from tax avoidance studies. We develop a new measure of corporate cash tax...

We develop a model to examine the effects of Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) Interpretation No. 48, Accounting for Uncertainty in Income Taxes (FIN 48), on the strategic interaction between publicly-traded corporate taxpayers and the government. Several of our findings contradict...