How sensitive is inward foreign direct investment (FDI) from the United States (US) to developing Asia to corporate tax rates? This is a relevant question given the sweeping US tax bill effective in 2018, which provided incentives for US corporations abroad to repatriate profits. Using panel...

How sensitive is inward foreign direct investment (FDI) from the United States (US) to developing Asia to corporate tax rates? This is a relevant question given the sweeping US tax bill effective in 2018, which provided incentives for US corporations abroad to repatriate profits. Using panel...

In a corporate inversion, a U.S.-incorporated taxpayer renounces its status as a U.S. corporation and becomes incorporated, for tax purposes, in a tax-friendly foreign jurisdiction. The recent surge in inversions is not a new phenomenon, and constitutes the fourth generation of these...

We develop a tax competition model that allows for the setting of both an origin-based and a destination-based commodity tax rate in the presence of avoidance and evasion. In the presence of evasion, jurisdictions will give cross-border shoppers tax preferential treatment, thus not fully...

We use a proprietary data set with detailed executive compensation information to examine the relationship between the incentives of the tax director and GAAP and cash effective tax rates, the book-tax gap, and measures of tax aggressiveness. We find that the incentive compensation of the tax...

We show that tax enforcement benefits US firms that borrow from banks. Using data on syndicated loans over the 1993-2017 period, we find that higher IRS audit probabilities exert a negative and significant effect on the cost of loans. The baseline estimates show that a one standard deviation...

This paper analyzes the sources of heterogeneity in legal tax avoidance strategies across individuals. Three conditions are required for a taxpayer to participate in tax avoidance: incentive, access, and awareness. Using rich Swedish administrative panel data with a unique link between corporate...

I leverage a Pakistani tax reform that cuts the tax rate on the supply chains of five major industries of the country from 15% to 0% to cast light on the extent of, and mechanisms driving, VAT noncompliance in a representative emerging economy. I find that firms overclaim refunds by 22% and...

This paper, written for a European conference on tax and corporate governance, evaluates two aspects of the U.S. legal response to corporate tax shelters: the civil penalty rules and the disclosure rules. It argues that, while the disclosure rules do not impose undue burdens, their usefulness to...

This paper investigates whether economies of scale exist for tax planning. In particular, do larger, more profitable, multinational corporations avoid more taxes than other firms, resulting in lower effective tax rates? While the empirical results indicate that ceteris paribus, larger...