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....

We use new annual data on gasoline taxes and corporate income taxes from U.S. states to analyze whether politicians avoid tax increases in election years. These data contain 3 useful attributes: (1) when state politicians enact tax laws, (2) when state politicians implement tax laws on consumers...

Paul Daugerdas gained notoriety for himself and his erstwhile firm, Jenkens & Gilchrist, as the designer of a tax shelter that uses contingent liabilities to generate artificial tax losses on a grand scale. The basic shelter transaction is surprisingly simple. In essence, it uses offsetting...

This chapter evaluates the recent OECD Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) initiative directed at global digital income, and concludes that tax planning will not be inhibited by any significant extent. Tax planners and academics nevertheless should take into account prospective reforms...

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) launched its project to address base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) in 2013 with an Action Plan of 15 Actions. Action 1 encompasses identifying difficulties the digital economy poses for applying existing international tax...

Theory and recent empirical literature suggest that social and professional connections may influence corporate policy. However, inference may be biased by the possibility that firms who share peers also share unobserved characteristics that are correlated with observed policy. Using a novel...

In his observations on countering tax avoidance, Sir Ivor concludes that a clearly formulated, well understood and workable general anti-avoidance provision is an essential feature of a modern income tax system. But it is not the peg on which the whole system should rest. The practical answer...

Among the possible responses to the problem of avoidance a country may enact a general anti-avoidance rule, couched in terms wide enough to frustrate tax planning strategies that have yet to be invented. One difficulty of general anti-avoidance rules is that they cannot be interpreted as undoing...

In his Technical Information Bulletin of February 1990 the Commissioner of Inland Revenue issued a policy statement on Section 99 of the New Zealand Income Tax Act 1976. Section 99 is a general anti-avoidance provision that voids for income tax purposes arrangements that have the purpose or...

In both Australia and the U.S., the tax anti-avoidance law has evolved to include two common doctrinal components. One component requires evidence of taxpayers' tax avoidance purpose. The other component protects transactions clearly contemplated by the tax statute against charges of tax...