Aggressive tax planning efforts of highly profitable multinational companies (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS)) have become the subject of intense public debate in recent years. As a response, several international initiatives and parties have called for more transparency in financial...

This paper examines whether firms exhibit less tax aggressiveness in order to mitigate workers' exposure to unemployment risk. We use unemployment insurance (UI) benefit laws as a proxy for unemployment risk and multiple measures of tax aggressiveness. Given that tax aggressiveness is risky and...

We examine whether three tax system characteristics – required book-tax conformity, worldwide versus territorial approach, and perceived strength of enforcement – impact corporate tax avoidance across countries after controlling for firm-specific factors previously shown to be associated...

Income taxes are a major expense for profitable corporations, oftentimes 25 percent or more of pretax income. This study exploits a setting – the market for corporate control – to test competing agency-based and risk-based explanations of corporate tax planning. Exploiting the staggered...