U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) need to allocate decision rights between parent companies and subsidiaries to manage global operations. This paper examines how the allocation of decision rights affects foreign earnings management of MNCs. I find that the extent of foreign earnings...

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 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...

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 explains the transactions, agreements and accounting that Chevron, Texaco, and the Government of Indonesia used to structure transactions that avoided billions in U.S. income taxes. Although ChevronTexaco became a merged entity on October 9, 2001, for many years Chevron and Texaco...

We investigate whether U.S. multinational corporations shift income overseas to the point of recording domestic pretax earnings around zero. We label firms with near-zero domestic earnings “Small” firms, and present evidence that Small captures targeted income shifting that minimizes...

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development introduced country-by-country reporting (CbCR) for multinational enterprises (MNEs) to help tax authorities combat tax-motivated income shifting. This study uses confidential tax administrative data from 2011 to 2018 to examine the...

This paper examines the hospital management practices of manipulating financial earnings within the bounds of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). We conduct regression analyses that relate earnings management to hospital characteristics to assess the economic determinants of...